Another Look at Vachel Lindsay

 

     Once upon a time, when I was too old for nursery rhymes and young yet for T. S. Eliot, Vachel Lindsay was one of my favorite poets.  Along with works like Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” Byron’s "The Destruction of Sennacherib," and the works of Edgar Allan Poe (my favorite was “Ulalume”), I relished Lindsay’s strident rhythms.  Alone, I would read aloud “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” or “The Congo” for the sake of sound, hardly noticing themes.  By high school I had abandoned him in favor of the High Modernists of his era, reproducing the evolution of taste that led to the diminution of Lindsay’s reputation in the ‘twenties.  Lindsay’s pounding cadences which had seemed innovative, even avant-garde, seemed suddenly vulgar, and his work was discounted and then ignored.  Renewed interest was nearly always defensive. 

     Attempts to rehabilitate him could sound almost apologetic.  One friendly critic argued for a “redefinition” of Lindsay’s significance taking into account the total body of his work, “even if such a survey decided that no reassessment of Lindsay’s literary merit was justified.” [1]  Another, recognizing that his literary reputation was “dead,” asks  “might he be taken as in any sense now a serious poet?” [2]  Because “Lindsay is not seen much these days,” vanished from anthologies and textbooks, a scholar must remind readers that he “was once considered a giant of ‘The New Poetry,’ one of the handful of major poets in the second or third decades of this century who seemed capable of shaping the American idiom in verse for the modern age.” [3]  Yet another concedes, while making a plea for portions of his work, that he was himself “largely responsible for the decline in his reputation,” since his “critical judgement” was “deficient,” resulting in the fact that “none of his books is free of shoddy.” Not to mention the “slovenly proofreading.”  [4]

    Yet when new his work had been greeted in The Little Review as “perilously near great poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and color,” and Lindsay was proposed to be “the next great American poet.”  To this critic the obstacle to Lindsay’s recognition was not his playing to the masses, but, on the contrary, his advanced technique.  “Like every artist who creates a new form,” she observed, he must “educate his public.” [5] In 1920 future British poet laureate John Masefield called him “the best American poet.” [6]

     The respect the poet received from critics was more than matched by popular acclaim.  Whereas he had tramped across the country in 1906 and 1912, he now sold out large halls before paying audiences.  A literary historian notes that “during the early 1920’s Vachel Lindsay was undoubtedly the most widely known and popular of contemporary American poets.” [7]  He himself was uneasy with aspects of his celebrity.  Having coined the term “the Higher Vaudeville” to describe his more sensationally bombastic pieces, he was then chagrined to find that his audience knew nothing of his other work.  Referring to bookings at intellectual centers such as universities, he noted that he had been “frosted in Boston and hissed at Bryn Mawr” [8] and observed that “most schools do not want me but once.” [9]  He complained that he did not wish to be “the ‘Casey At-The-Bat’ of American poetry.” [10]

     Though Lindsay was well aware of the tensions between popular art and high art, he felt he could lure the less refined masses into enlightenment and progress by convincing them it was all a lark.  He thus cultivated “a sort of rag-time manner that deceives them into thinking they are at the vaudeville.” [11]  Since he considered that he was slipping art to his readers or listeners without their quite knowing that it is good for them, he sometimes called the Higher Vaudeville the Higher Irony. [12]  In this way he differed from proletarian authors like the Wobblies’ T-Bone Slim (Matti Valentin Huhta) or the Communists’ Mike Gold who considered their own aesthetics to be those of the masses.

     Lindsay for his part rejected other innovators of his own time.  He dismissed imagism as an “Aesthetic Aristocracy singing on an island to one another while the people perish.” [13]  For him cubism in painting was a trend that would rapidly be forgotten. [14]   Though he was called “the jazz poet,” he had no taste for jazz which he, as an opponent of alcohol, associated with drink.  He wrote at a time when the split between popular art and high art was becoming ever greater and commodified mass culture was replacing traditional folk culture.  Many artists, the Symbolists and the High Modernists in poetry as well as Dadaists and Surrealists, reacted defensively, producing defiantly unpopular work, sometimes intentionally obscurantist, while Lindsay went out of his way to use demotic idiom..

     Lindsay’s “Gospel of Beauty” was entirely bound up with his concepts of reforming American culture.  A devotee of what he called “the new localism,” his “Gospel of Beauty” was one not only with “the love of the hearth and the Village.” but also with “the love of God.”  Eschewing “art for art’s sake,” for him a “theory of aesthetics” and a “theory of the new Localism” were portions of the same system. [15]  Beneath his artistic practice lay a vision of social justice, and beneath that a vaguely Swedenborgian mysticism of his own invention.  Even his apparently political “Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket” concludes with a wholly spiritual motive.

 

Come, let us vote against our human nature,

Crying to God in all the polling places

To heal our everlasting sinfulness

And make us sages with transfigured faces.

 

In this way he advances in the twentieth century Whitman’s vision of a spiritual democracy by using language to uplift, unite, and enlighten his fellow countrymen.

     His work is problematic in the first place because his search for a popular idiom was driven less by his innate verbal genius as by his ambition to have an effect on society, to advance his program to bring America around to a mystical socialism more exotic than the existing American varieties, among them the Christian socialism of Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance (and brother of Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward inspired the Nationalist Clubs); the populist partisanship of Julius Wayland’s Appeal to Reason (published in Girard Kansas), and the perennial socialist campaigning of Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas.  Even these trends, more palatable to some Americans than the I. W. W. with its heavy immigrant membership and willingness to sanction violence, however, were extirpated with the vigorous suppression of all shades of anti-capitalist activity.  Lindsay’s visions had by the mid-twentieth century, long seemed obsolete.

     Whatever assessment one may make of the aesthetic value of Lindsay’s oeuvre, he has an undeniable place in several sub-narratives of American literature.  In both performance poetry and in Tendenzdichtung his place is secure next to Carl Sandburg, another once-celebrated poet now neglected for being accessible even to ill-educated readers.   His unique style of recitation, chanting and singing, stretching and compressing words, is fortunately preserved in recordings made during the last of the eighteen years he toured the country.  [16] 

     Lindsay did write a good deal apart from his declamatory poems.  He composed a number of quieter lyrics in conventional forms meant to be read in calmer fashion.  The contemplative “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” doubtless due to its theme, was highly popular despite being quieter than his poem to “John Brown.”  Lyrics like “On the Garden Wall” and “Shakespeare” which lack Lindsay’s fiery energy, are palpably second-rate.  “The City of Glass” is pretty in the manner of a Maxfield Parrish print.  “Buddha,” while otherwise unremarkable, may engage the reader’s attention through its topic.

     In addition to his poetry, Lindsay produced prose pieces detailing his “Gospel of Beauty” and his wanderings on the open road, a treatment of the art of cinema, short stories, a novel too strange for most readers, visual art and photography, all neglected today. 

     His book on movies The Art of the Moving Picture first came out in 1915.  Its date alone makes it a groundbreaking work, and Lindsay was a serious filmgoer.  Every page of his study is filled with specific examples of stories, sequences, and actors to illustrate his points, in spite of the fact that feature length films were still in their infancy.  His respect for popular entertainment anticipates Gilbert Seldes’ study The Seven Lively Arts which productively treats comic strips, vaudeville, circuses, and other popular entertainments as art.  His larger schemes such as the division of films into those focusing on action, intimacy, or splendor may no longer seem useful, though at least it does foreground the visual character of the medium, but many of his comments are insightful.  His book is replete with clever and provocative observations such as his comparison of Mary Pickford with a figure in Botticelli. [17]

     Lindsay had considered his novel The Golden Book of Springfield likely to prove the chef d’oeuvre of his career.  He said shortly before its release “I am making it the one thought of my life, and hope when it is done, it will be the one book of my life.”  Buoyed by optimism about his visionary project, he said “I feel younger, and may sail to the end of the world, yet!” [18] yet a short time later he noted sadly of The Golden Book “I am afraid it is a failure.” [19]  The book indeed proved to be a popular and critical failure, by some accounts the starting point of the depression that led to his suicide.  It has found few readers since and has been pronounced unreadable by some who approached it.  It is utopian and yet dystopian, socialist yet individualist, realistic and fantastic.  In the rapid changes from 1918 to 2018, from “prognostication” to future incarnations, never knowing when the book itself will come flying through the air, it is little wonder that many find Lindsay’s most ambitious project a dizzying mess.

     Even Lindsay’s more sympathetic critics have regularly qualified their praise until it nearly vanishes.  Even during his heyday, when Time magazine saluted him as “a true poet,” its critic added that, “a great deal of his work will probably last much longer than some of our elaborately sophisticated cognoscenti believe.” [20]  The scholarly consensus since has been cooler yet.  Virtually every mildly positive comment on him sounds defensive, apologetic, hedged about with qualifications.  One if his most acute defenders focuses quite rightly on Lindsay’s his role as a reformer, moralist, and shaper of a new American culture rather noting a specifically artistic legacy.  ““Perhaps we can again value his vision of America, the words, rhythms, and experiences of the many, sung or sounded with imagination and authenticity.”  When read aloud, Lindsay might still afford a a glimpse of “Lindsay’s vision of America . . . a rich, troubling, musical, and fantastic view of our culture. [21]

     This praise follows Lindsay’s own preference for a social rather than aesthetic role.  Anticipating the publication of The Golden Book of Springfield he wrote “I hardly see myself as a poet any more. I see myself as a kind of a forecaster and maker of dreams in Springfield.” The goal of leading his fellow-citizens to a more enlightened way of life had always underlain his work; the Higher Vaudeville gave him a huge audience and with it an income for a time, but he recognized as well as the critics the limits of such work.  Like a good deal of spoken word today, orally performed poems are generally free of contradictions, mysteries, and ambiguities; they are typically simple enough to be digested at first hearing.  The dramatic spectacle of recitation does not survive the occasion, however exciting the live show may have been. 

     In the end another look at Vachel Lindsay may only remind readers of the twenty-first century that more than one lineage may be accommodated in literary history.  The coexistence of a variety of genres can only enrich American literature.  Vachel Lindsay’s bombastic performance pieces are, in their own way, beautiful and significant as are the blues lyrics of Robert Johnson, toasts like “the Signifying Monkey,” the Wobbly songs of Ralph Chaplin, Baxter Black’s cowboy poetry, and raps by Tupac Shakur.  Lindsay’s intention to push toward a new vision of America is fundamentally a spiritual and a social program, best measured against fellow American dreamers from the nineteenth century Owenites and Fourierists, through Bellamy’s Looking Backward, to the Haight-Ashbury communalists of the ‘sixties and beyond.  He is worth remembering if only for having made Johnny Appleseed an American saint.

 

1.  Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).

2.  Edwin H. Cady, “Vachel Lindsay Across the Chasm” in Indiana University Bookman 5 (1960).

3.  John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is "Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985), pp. 233-24.  Note the article’s title.

4.  Albert Edmund Trombly, “Listeners and Readers: The Unforgetting of Vachel Lindsay” in the Southwest Review Vol. 47, No. 4 (autumn 1962), pp. 294-302.

5. “Eunice Tietjens’ review of The Congo and Other Poems in The Little Review April 1914 (I,4).

6.  The English and American Muse,” The Bookman, Volume 57 (February 1920).

7.  Trombly’s article (cited in note 5).

8.  Handwritten 1919 marginal note on Lindsay’s copy of “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence.”  Repeated in a July 20, 1919 letter to Sara Teasdale.

9.  April 21, 1919 letter to A. J. Armstrong,

10.  June 16, 1927 letter to Frederic Melcher, quoted in the Vachel Lindsay number of the Indiana University Bookman, no. 5, December 1960, p. 41. 

11.  Letter of Vachel Lindsay to Jessie B. Rittenhouse, quoted in Jessie B. Rittenhouse My House of Life, p. 316. 

12.  See Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).

13.  “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence” p. 6.

14.  The Golden Book of Springfield, p. 13.

15.  Letter to Witter Bynner April 6, 1912.

16.   A rich selection of Lindsay’s performances is available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lindsay.php. 

17.  On p.28

18.  Both phrases are in a May 30, 1919, letter to Sara Teasdale.

19.  December 7, 1920 letter to Sara Teasdale.

20.  In a review of Lindsay’s Collected Poems, July 09, 1923.

21.  John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is "Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985), pp. 233-24. 

Korinna and the Choral Lyric

     In our era both the composition and the consumption of poetry are often conceived as solitary activities. Since the Romantics the cultivation of individual sensibility of both writer and reader has seemed the primary aesthetic goal, yet in fact this assumption has been dominant only in recent literary history, apart from the fact that it is less than wholly accurate in any era. The greatest share of human cultural production has aimed at expressing shared values, community sentiment, received ideas, and satisfying commonplaces. In thematic terms, liturgies, folk song and story, as well as patriotic and sentimental texts and the productions of mass culture such as popular television, all are primarily aimed at reinforcing attitudes – moods and tones as well as specific beliefs – already accepted by the audience. From the Golddiggers of 1933 to the latest Bollywood extravaganza, in Broadway, Las Vegas shows, and on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera we continue to relish the spectacle of groups of attractive young dancers who speak with one voice.
     The care expended on such events in antiquity is dramatically attested by an account preserved by Athenaeus of the Spartan Hyakinthia.

 

But the middle day of the three days there is a variety-filled [poikilē] spectacle [theā] and a great and notable gathering of all [panēguris]. Boys wearing girtup khitons play the lyre, sweeping all the strings with the plectrum as they sing the god in the anapaestic rhythm and at a high pitch. Others pass through the viewing area [theatron] on finely ornamented horses. Massed choruses [khoroi] of young men now enter and sing some of the epichoric songs, while dancers mixed in with them perform the ancient dance movements to the pipe [aulos] and the singing. Next maidens enter, some riding in richly adorned wicker carts, while others make their competitive procession in chariots yoked with mules. And the entire city is astir, rejoicing at the spectacle [theōria]. On this day they sacrifice an abundance of animal victims, and the citizens feast all their acquaintances and their own slaves. And no one is left out of the sacrifice [thusia], and what happens is that the city is emptied for the spectacle [thea]. [1]

     Clearly, choral song was central to the celebrations of the divine hero in an observance so joyful and universal that both helots and foreigners were welcome to join citizens to participate.
     Something of the character of their verses may be inferred from the few scattered remains of the Boeotian poet Korinna. She specifically declares that her role is to sing, not of her own inmost thoughts, but of “the brave deeds of heroes and heroines.” (664) She pays homage to Terpsichore (“delight in dancing”) as her particular muse, emphasizing not only the movement that should accompany her words, but also their collective character. She defines her audience as “Tanagra’s white-robed daughters,” but also more broadly declares that choral lyric provides the occasion for the entire city to rejoice. (655) Her story of the contest between the mountains Helikon and Kithaeron reflects the public poetic competitions so familiar to the ancient Greeks. (654)
     Such social observances allowed the community to celebrate specifically what it held in common: in particular the myths that made sense of the cosmos. The dancing of the choric troupes expressed in their patterned loveliness a greater beauty and a more sublime order and reassured every individual that all was not merely well, all was marvelous and wonderful. In a story significant if not factual, Korinna is said to have rebuked Pindar for insufficient use of myths, to her “the proper business of poetry.” [3]
     Choral lyrics, indeed, are the source of tragic drama, both chronologically according to Aristotle and thematically. Meaning is so concentrated in the mythic discourse of the choral passages that they can often be read as a short version of the play, though many modern readers find the interactions of individual characters, in particular the stichomythia, more dramatic. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the chorus regards itself as the physical sign and even the very guarantor of cosmic order, asking, if injustice is allowed to flourish, “why then would we dance together?” [2] Conversely, the beautiful dancing reflects that all is well and reassures the community that it is not threatened.
     In this way choral lyrics like Korinna’s define and reinforce the group’s collective assumptions in a way characteristic of religious liturgies, folk stories, television situation comedies, and other popular and mass art forms. The modern reader is likely to privilege the more apparently individualistic emotions of monody from Arkhilokhos or Sappho, but in antiquity her fellow countrymen felt sufficient regard for Korinna’s choral works that they built a statue of her in her hometown and included a painting of her in the gymnasium. [4] Indeed our own culture’s most significant images may likewise be enshrined in the most popular of arts as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and others observed. When one makes Romantic assumptions foregrounding innovation, one turns away from the bulk of human cultural production.
     I knew an excellent critic, one if the best, who insisted that the point of literature was to challenge preconceptions, to indicate cracks, ambiguities, ambivalence, and contradiction in received ideas, and he was not wrong, but his view, I believe, was incomplete. The opposite function, the reinforcement of what one’s consumers already believe is an equal, indeed complementary, role of art. Neither enjoys supremacy.


1. Gregory Nagy,”Transformations of Choral Lyric Traditions in the Context of Athenian State Theater,” Arion 3 (1994/5) 41–55. Also available at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Transformations_of_Choral_Lyric_Traditions.1995.

2. Oedipus Tyrannos, 896 “εἰ γὰρ αἱ τοιαίδε πράξεις τίμιαι, τί δεῖ με χορεύειν;”

3. From Plutarch’s Moralia, Κατὰ τί ἔνδοξοι Αθηναῖοι (On the Glory of the Athenians or De Gloria Atheniensium) “ In what were the Athenians famous?, ", 347-8. Plutarch goes on to tell how Pindar earned a further criticism by then composing lines with too many mythic references, a complaint that has been alleged against him by more recent critics as well. Plato notes as well that poetry’s foundation in myth which is to say in falsity is a sign of poetry’s removal from reality.

4. Description of Greece 9.22.3

Song Lyrics as Poetry

This is a draft of my thoughts on the subject to be presented December 9, 2018 as part of a Megaphone Series program on the topic at the Seligmann Center.


     Over the chronological and geographic span of our species, poetry has far more often been consumed as sounds in the air than as signs on a two dimensional surface. In this sense the youth listening to pop songs on an iPod is more traditional than the Wordsworth scholar reading silently in the library. The fact is that until the Renaissance, most poetry was performed: lyric forms were sung and epics chanted often to musical accompaniment. Ancient Greek and medieval English poems alike were sung; not infrequently, the authors of Tang Dynasty Chinese poems and troubadours from the south of France titled poems with the name of the well-known song their rhythms recalled. Blues lyrics and some from the Great American Songbook may be among the most beautiful poems of the twentieth century. And, of course, Dylan, who decades ago was praised by Christopher Ricks, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, has now received the Nobel prize.
     The assumption that poems are more beautiful and meaningful than song lyrics is today clearly less widespread than it once was, though it has not disappeared entirely. There is, indeed, no formula nor can there be proof of literary excellence. Value can only appear in one’s consumption of art. Beauty is manifested in widely differing forms depending on the genre of the work in question.
     One sort of art might seem superior to another, more likely to elicit sensations of beauty and sublimity, and the most theoretically compelling is perhaps the Gesamtkunstwerk. If a reader is moved by a written text, how much stronger might the impact be when the text is sung? Add a striking set design, costumes that transform the actors, and dance to add yet another layer of signifiers, and one arrives at the concept, at least, of what might be defended as the very most effective work of art. Yet of course, its advantage is illusory. Quantity of signifiers is not equivalent to their quality. A simple piece may be more powerful than a complex one. Bollywood movies as well as Wagnerian operas employ multiple arts for effect.
     In practice the desirable integration of words and music is elusive. When poetic lyrics are sung, it is very difficult to maintain a balance between the musical and verbal elements. In general, when poetry is read with jazz, for instance, the musicians will follow the poet, accompanying the words with appropriate sounds. On Steve Allen’s television performance with Jack Kerouac , Allen provides no more than frames and decorations for Kerouac’s reading. Often music functions as a movie soundtrack often does, seeking to reinforce the primary element – image or word – while never taking the spotlight.
     On the other hand, Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” is primarily musical with the simple, direct words making their impression through their apparent sincerity and transgressive hip radicalism. Many thirteenth century comments on troubadours critique their melodies as though the poems were incidental. Who remembers such librettists as Francesco Maria Piave or even Lorenzo Da Ponte as significant poets? How many opera-goers, while knowing the story, even follow the words of each passage? For unity the pitch and timbre of the abstract sounds must equally support and be supported by the language. Yet if this demanding goal is even partially met, the result can be enchanting.
     The general dialectic of performed and written texts is exemplified by the comparison of sung versus read poems. Out loud, the effect is different every time but fixed for the individual performance; on the page it is set as in stone yet subject to ever-new readings. Whereas the sung lyric is animated and immediate though evanescent and caught in the unrolling of time, on the page it stands still, palpably concrete. The exact symmetry of these relations indicates that neither is superior; the excitement of music in the air is balanced against the richness of possibility retained on the page.
     Song lyrics, as they are designed for musical accompaniment, do differ from lines meant to be read, either aloud or silently. The song must be understood in passing, processed by the consumer as it happens like a film or a symphony, while the reader may return at liberty to reread a written text. Therefore printed lyrics may be knotty and resistant to interpretation while sung ones tend toward transparent lucidity. The first is more likely to challenge assumptions and introduce new ideas whereas the latter will tend to confirm pre-existing attitudes.
     Further, the social situation in which singing occurs reinforces the unanimity of response. Often songs are addressed to a more specific audience. Warriors liked heroic epics, a cabaret audience is likely to value sophistication and polish, a heavy metal crowd will like dark and edgy imagery. Jazz clubs appeal to the hip, polka dances to those hip to a different beat altogether. While an individual poem in a book may likewise suggest a certain taste, the next poem may be quite different and the character of the readership is comparatively unpredictable.
     Ordinarily songs have a set stanza form with very little variation from one verse to the next. While a written poem may be structured in the same way, it has as well countless other possible forms. The song usually sticks to a single rhythmic pattern, though variation is always possible within limits, but a poet contemplating publication can use or ignore rhythm and rhyme much more freely. Many songs employ repeated content, whether a refrain or a key phrase, perhaps the song’s title, while poems in a book are less apt to do so.
     Singing, especially to accompaniment, adds elements of volume, stress, pitch and timbre which may either reinforce and enrich or distract from the piece as a whole. Just as the compelling vocalism of a great singer can make mediocre lyrics moving, shallow pop stylings can enervate even strong songs.
     Printed lyrics are generically different from sung ones, and a poem read out loud from a book or a song printed without music will be somewhere between. Each genre has unique challenges; neither is inherently more artful or beautiful. Indeed, each generic distinction opens certain possibilities while narrowing others.


• The addition of signifiers in music, phrasing, etc. increases expressive potential if all elements are mutually supportive. There is a risk of their not fitting and thus generating aesthetic dissonance that is absent in the silent reading of the printed page.

• Due to the social nature of performance thematic elements in songs more likely reinforce the already existing ideas of the audience. Thus they are less likely to challenge preconceptions or introduce new ideas.

• The formal reflection of the comparative thematic predictability of song is their adherence to a repeated metrical and rhyme pattern, adding melody and ingenuity while sacrificing the possibilities available to irregular and free verse.

• Songs have the immediacy of live performance yet lack the rich potential for leisurely contemplation offered by the page. Songs cannot in general afford tangled obscurity but aim rather at clarity and transparence. Sometimes the most direct, seemingly heartfelt lines are strongest, sometimes the ironic, oblique, and allusive.

The Last Poets

While recognizing that these artists are best consumed through the medium of their recordings, I am here concerned only with the portion of their published work presented in two books. Some of these texts are much later than others and some of the poets on early Last Poets recordings are not included. On a Mission contains considerable prose material including an introduction by Amiri Baraka and lengthy essays from Abiodun Oyewole and Bin Hassan, while The Last Poets Vibes from the Scribes has author’s headnotes for each poem. I concern myself here with nothing but the poetry.

On a Mission: Selected Poems and a History of The Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan with Kim Green, forward by Amiri Baraka

The Last Poets Vibes from the Scribes, London: Pluto Press, 1985 featuring Jalal Nuriddin and Suliaman El Hadi.


     I recall in the early seventies reading in a black neighborhood bar on San Francisco’s Divisadero Street in which I was the anomaly. Most of the poets wrote highly melodic revolutionary race-conscious verse with insistent rhythm and rhyme. The same was true of the residents of a halfway house for ex-convicts who frequently showed up at the open readings at the Starry Plough in Berkeley at Shattuck and Prince during the same era. Their poetic technique was surely in part descended from the style of “toasts” such as “The Signifying Monkey,” but doubtless owed a debt as well to popular music and advertising jingles. Readers were often backed by musicians and recordings of such experimentation includes pioneering work by Langston Hughes in the thirties, Kenneth Patchen in the forties, and Beat poets in the fifties. [1]
     I thought of that experience recently upon reading two books of the Last Poets, the celebrated and, briefly, even popular writers whom I am sure those Bay Area poets knew well. Their thematic preoccupations were shaped by the history specific to that era. There is certainly no doubt that the ensemble arose in a highly specific political context, two years after the proclamation of Black Power by Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) in June of 1966. [2] The Last Poets ceremoniously conceived themselves as self-consciously radical cultural nationalists on May 19, the birthday both of Malcom X (Malik el Shabazz) and Ho Chi Minh at Marcus Garvey Park in East Harlem. They were perhaps the most prominent poetic expression of the Black Arts Movement that arose from Black Power and Black Nationalist ideologies. Among the Last Poets’ immediate predecessors in this tradition were the On Guard and Umbra groups including Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Harold Cruse, Steve Cannon, Ishmael Reed, and the Uptown Writers Movement.
     One of those involved in this last formation was South African Keorapetse "Willie" Kgositsile, an African Nationalist Congress activist in exile. [3] In an apocalyptic anticipation of a bloody upheaval Kgositsile had declared an end to “art talk.” “The only poem you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted in the punctured marrow of the villain.” David Nelson (Dahveed ben Israel) added, “Therefore we are the last poets of the world.”
     Various writers and musicians constituted the Last Poets group in books and recordings. Their albums [4] attracted considerable attention, even attaining a spot on the top ten list, after which they faded from public notice after the early seventies (though most members continued recording albums and writing). Today, In spite of their unquestionable historic role in American politics, the Black Arts Movement, and the renaissance of performance poetry, the Last Poets are virtually unread. Their work is very difficult to obtain. On a Mission: Selected Poems and a History of The Last Poets has long been out of print and my own local library had to borrow a British edition of Vibes from the Scribes from the Library of Congress for me.
     Considering their present obscurity, I think it wise to avoid evaluation and interpretation. I shall not consider the history either of America’s troubled relation to race or to the conflicts among the ever-changing roster of bickering writers that were at different times presented under the Last Poets name. I mean to offer here only a descriptive sketch of the work of some of their number with the hope that they will gain new readers in a later era in which their poetry and their politics remain powerful and provocative.
     Themes common to all the Last Poets include portrayal of American racism and exploitation of blacks and two reactions, which seem altogether opposed, but which are sometimes articulated in more subtle ways. The first is the self-destructive turn by some to drugs, reckless self-indulgence, and crime, but this is balanced by the profound redemptive quality of black art, represented by the poets’ own words on the page but also by jazz.
     Each, of course, has an individual vision and a unique style. Jalal Nuriddin is sometimes called “grandfather of rap” for his work in the spoken word, called in the sixties spieling. He himself referred to his style as "spoagraphics" or "spoken pictures." His usual style is poised between conversation and declamation with three or four beats to the line, occasionally expanding to underline a point. A reserved manipulation of typeface reproduces, or at least implies, the performative aspect of the poem, and the rolling rhymes propel the verses forward. In “Jazzoetry” the poet suggests that his manner can lead to enlightenment, to “dig bop” can lead to a “new birth.” “Dig the sound of our love inside our pride.” [5] In “Bird’s Word” the recitation of a catalogue of names of great artists serves as a charm to uplift the oppressed.
     The confrontation between white and black in “On the Subway” (the setting as well of Dutchman) might seem exaggerated to those who did not experience the peculiar character of American race relations a few generations ago. Setting the problem out in words well served both parties. In Nuriddin’s “Wake Up Niggers” “the cock crows” to bring the listener to full consciousness (the image appears as well in medieval Christian poetry). Here the racial epithet of the title is used neither in its racist meaning nor with the neutral or positive associations it bears sometimes in more modern rap, but to condemn those who fail to recognize the need for change. To the poet complacency can only arise in those who have been taken in by “lies” and “alibis” of “spies” (“Surprises”) but art (here represented by Miles Davis) can bring the truth. The negative consequences of slavery a hundred years after abolition are highlighted in “Jones Coming Down” and “O.D.” (which juxtaposes a “Bird Lives” graffito with a sign admonishing “PLEASE DON’T PEE IN OUR HALL.”
     Suliaman El Hadi writes in the same middle-length lines but with fewer rhymes, more repetition and freer use of anaphora. In his themes he has a predilection the mythic. He quite realistically admires “Ho Chi Minh” for his (eventually successful) resistance to imperialism but also indulges in an imagined Edenic pre-Columbian era in America (“Before the White Man came”). Similarly “Hands Off” presents a mythic Afrocentric view of history and “Blessed Are Those Who Struggle” reads almost like an early 20th century labor anthem with its singable quatrains, listing heroes of the struggle including Drew Ali and Marus Garvey with Dubois and the Panthers. To El Hadi oppression is caused by deceitful Jinn (see “It’s a Trip”) while “Delights of the Garden” provides a description of paradise.
     In his view birth control is an “evil design” and “it is better to use self-control.” (“The Pill”) In fact according to “This is Your Life” science itself is enwrapped in the arms race, the colonization of space, and future rule by “a mechanical race” of robots. “Get Moving” is a call to seek “freedom” in ways little defined but which include “keep your obligations to your Lord.” Here he echoes Nuriddin’s call for people to “wake up, wakeup.”
     Abiodun Oyewole employs short to mid-length lines with much repetition and irregular use of rhyme. Perhaps his line in “When the Revolution Comes” noting that “some of us will catch it on TV” is in part responsible for the erroneous association of Gil Scott-Heron and his poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" [6] with the Last Poets. Oyewole’s “Run Nigger,” like Nuriddin’s “Wake Up Niggers” and and Bin Hadi’s “Niggers R Scared of Revolution” condemns those who fail to move toward liberation. [7] He writes love poems as well (such as “Black Rose” and “Brown Sugar”) while condemning exploitation of women in “Gash Man.”
     “Invocation” provides an identity and history of the Last Poets as a group. Telling the tale of the ritual of their founding and naming, Oyewole describes their truth-telling “mission,” noting that they aimed to be “sassy and funky and sincere,” which is to say stylishly beautiful, yet down and dirty in the realities of everyday life, with a primary loyalty to truth. “Last Rites” is a magic griot charm insisting that the group will survive and grow and be “the light to show them the way” to the apocalyptic change when “the last shall be first,/ and the first shall be last.”
     In the twenty-first century, in the era of Black Lives Matter and the prison-industrial complex and widespread Islamophobia, we might do well to reread the Last Poets. At their best they incarnated what Amiri Baraka called for:


what is needed is what the Griot/Djali provided, information,
inspiration, reformation, and self determination! Mama Sky,
we cried, hook us up with the Electricity. Turn us ON. That city
of our deep desire. [8]




1. I find the performances on Fantasy of the Cellar Jazz ensemble with Rexroth and Ferlinghetti compelling.

2. Ironically Frederick Douglass had used the same phrase in the 1850s referring to the exaggerated political influence of slave-owners. Douglass optimistically predicted that “the days of Black Power are numbered. . . Liberty must triumph.” See Winston A. Van Horne, "Sustaining Black Studies," Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, (January 2007).

3. Kgositsile later returned to Africa and in 2005 was named poet laureate of South Africa. His son is a hip-hop artist.

4. Right On from Gylan Kain, David Nelson, and Felipe Luciano was released in 1967 and The Last Poets with Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyewole, Alafia Pudim (a.k.a. Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin) and Nilja in 1969. (The Supremes released an album titled Right On in 1970. The same phrase is the title of a 1971 film using these poets on the soundtrack.)

5. Many will recall the posters with Che Guevara’s words “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”

6. On his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.

7. In his headnote to the poem Oyewole credits fellow Last Poet Gylan Kain for defining nigger for him in another poem: “Niggers Are Untogether People.” He also credits their colleague David Nelson for documenting the futility of niggers, writing “Die, Nigga, Die.”

8. “Griot/Jali Poetry, Music, History, Message” from Jali Kunda: Griots of West Africa and Beyond ed. By Matthew Kopka and Iris Brooks (Roslyn NY: Ellipsis Arts, 1996), 78-82.