On "The Vintage Book of African American Poetry"

Abstract

Of aU the books that have come through our office for possible review this year, the one I have found most welcome has been The Vintage of African Poetry edited by Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton (New York: Random House, 2000). Four hundred pages in paper, it is a bedside compan ion into which I can dip and begin to repair, with the help of intelUgent guides, our senile system of neglect. What's more it's fun. Any anthology that surprises with a deft turn on Emily Dickinson?the flies /just stood around / and buzzed / when she died?or with a startlingly radical Frankie and Johnny deUvers much more than instruction. The editors developed this anthology as an expansion of their Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (Little Brown, 1994). Another attractive newcomer is E. Ethelbert Miller's In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry (Stewart Tabori & Chang, 1994; paper 1996). Nor should one miss John Hollander's gathering of nearly one hundred pages of Folk Songs and Spirituals (and a roughly equal amount of American Indian Poetry) in Volume Two of his Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (Library of America, 1993). Not all those songs are of African origin, but many are; and the first Unes of Hollander's first choice?De talles' tree in Paradise,/ De Christian call de tree of Ufe? announce an intention, which I take to be to clarify and present a background of anonymous poetry for the African tradition that is equivalent, more or less, to the ballads and other anonymous lyrics that begin most an thologies of EngUsh verse. Splice that to the present coUection, which begins with the eighteenth century poets Jupitor Hammon, Benjamin Banneker, and PhilUs Wheatley, and an Oxford Book of African Verse would be at hand, and what a companion it would make. That Harper and Walton entertain such thoughts is evident everywhere, especiaUy as the poets sing of and to each other, reveling in their intersec tions. Rita Dove has a poem called Banneker; Hammon and Robert Hay den address Wheatley; SterUng A. Brown draws on the dialect voice of folk songs, while numerous other poets attach themselves to parallel musical traditions by writing to, for, and of Bessie Smith, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Muddy Waters. The ambition of the anthology, however, is larger than clarifying the tradi tion of African poetry. It is to correct our understanding of Ameri