Take Two-Larry Neal and the Blues God: Aspects of the Poetry

Abstract

Larry Neal was one of the most imaginative and talented writers and theorists of the generation of the 1960s, the generation that created the Black Arts Movement and the New Black Poetry. A complex person capable of holding in his consciousness contradictory elements in a state of high tension, he was at once enormously attracted to the achievements of the Modernist artists and to the revolutionary ideology of his age as embodied in Fanon, Marx, Mao Tse Tung, Cabral, and Malcolm X. He believed in the absolute necessity of historical analysis as a basis for revolutionary action at the same time that he knew that the true spirit of the revolution lay in the forms of Black culture, especially Black religion and Black music. On one hand, he felt that art was the handmaiden of political change; on the other, he knew that art was an instrument of prophecy and a vehicle of transcendence. Although deeply devoted to the study of his people's history, he understood, as few in that period did, the power of universal myth. Although conversant with the exciting achievements of the New Music, with Roach and Coltrane, Sun Ra and Coleman, he had a special place in his thought for Ellington, Holiday, Parker, Lester Young, and Miles Davis. And beneath it all was the blues, the men and women of the blues. Like Hughes and Brown and Ellison before him, he recognized the great synthesizing power of the blues, and in a manner more specific than theirs he recognized the spiritual and religious connection between the blues and the African past. The important thing about all this is that Neal sought to bring order out of his apparent contradictions. That effort one perceives until the very end in a considerable part of his work, and the record of his struggle is one of the outstanding accomplishments of the movement which he helped to create and to explain. For the purpose of this essay, I have chosen to examine Neal's two collections of poetry, Black Boogaloo and Hoo Doo Hollerin' Bebop Ghosts,1 in order to ascertain his changing perspectives and the technical means by which those changes are effected. Black Boogaloo, subtitled Notes on Black Liberation, was first published by the Journal of Black Poetry Press in 1969 and is dedicated to his wife, Evelyn. A preface by LeRoi Jones, Sound for Sounding, reinforces the subtitle. This book, Jones says, is a harbinger of things to come. It is a post literary book because the poet and his