Michael S. Harper, Poet Laureate Emeritus, Rhode
Island
Studied Poetry: I’m not a native Rhode
Islander but came to Brown University in 1970. I came from
San Francisco where I thought I’d remain since it was
the city I preferred to live in. I’d
lost my first neighborhood, Brooklyn, NY, at thirteen. It
took me a decade or more to recover. The critic Robert Bone pointed this out to me at a program
we shared on the artistry of Romare Bearden. I was born in
the same house as my mother, and delivered at home by the same
man, her father and my grandfather.
My mother taught me to read before kindergarten; my first
book A Thousand and One Nights. I graduated from high school in Los Angeles, 1955,
the year Charlie Parker died: Susan Miller Dorsey High School
was the name of the school, built on an anti-earthquake plan,
and named for the first superintendent of Los Angeles City
School District, a graduate of Vassar College.
I attended Dorsey
from 1952-1955 and never returned to the campus until thirty-one
years later, on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s natal day.
I gave a talk and a poetry reading and a reception was held
in the library of the administration building, the only two-storied
building on campus. “Dear Michael S. Harper: Welcome
Home” was written on a banner strewn across the library
proper. I realized on entering I’d never been in the
room as a student, a kind of epiphany, and a wake-up call to
my lost neighborhood of Brooklyn. In “Civics” class
in 1954 on my brother’s birthday, the Brown
v. Board of Education decision
was announced in the news. We never discussed the decision
in Civics. Though I was a good student by test I went on to
City College in Los Angeles, and after a few years and part
time work to supplement necessities, including the purchase
of my own automobile, became a transfer student at Los Angeles
State College. Both City and State Colleges shared the same
campus on Vermont Avenue. I studied a premedical course and
took courses across the curriculum. By the time I got to Brown
I had taught in several community colleges, at Reed and Lewis & Clark
Colleges in Portland, Oregon, and published a few poems in
various journals. I began as a playwright, then met Henri Coulette,
a poet, and Wirt Williams, a novelist, at L. A. State. Both
had attended the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa.
I wanted to travel to Paris after my undergraduate days: Richard
Wright had recently died, and I had begun to think about international
politics with the Sharpeville Incident in South Africa. When
I applied for a passport I received a draft notice instead.
Hurriedly I applied, in early January, 1961, to Paul Engle’s
Writers Workshop and entered ‘the Athens of the Midwest’ just
before JFK’s inauguration. I was later to teach his son,
JFK, Jr. at Brown in a literature course: South African Literature
in English in the early 80’s.
Writing: My
career began in the U.S. Postal Service at the Terminal Annex
in downtown Los Angeles, working ‘airmail’ and
mastering the canceling machine as a part time clerk on Tour
3. My father worked in the registry section, and later invented ‘express
mail’ as a supervisor. I remember working with Charles
Mingus’s sister in ‘airmail;’ she and I
were locked in a dysfunctional elevator on lunch break, and
I had to assist her climbing out the transom when the elevator
stopped dead. She was pregnant at the time and took aim at
my posturing, reminding me that most of the clerks in airmail
were readers, many with Ph.D’s: she told me to stop
carrying Dostoevski’s The Idiot in my back pocket.
I remembered that Wright himself had worked in the post office
in Chicago; when I wasn’t writing one act plays on
musicians I plotted out the antics of clerks waiting for
their off-days so they could write a novel or a collection
of stories. I began to listen to my co-workers for subject
matter. On the facing table was a deadline, and regular work,
and I sometimes could select other part-timers to work our
mandatory four hours before the helicopter landed and took
off from the roof of the TA to LAX. I wrote many a draft
while mimicking the tales of mail handlers and clerks.
Inspiration: From
books and movies. I always had a paper route, learned to
navigate the city. I was a loner. And I read in the open
stacks in the LACC and LA State Libraries: the same library
before LA State moved to a Mexican neighborhood on the San
Bernardino Freeway. Three changes of buses and streetcars
until I bought my own automobile: 2-3 hours on public transportation,
each way. Like my earlier days on the New York subway system
I rode a lot and watched people.
Mentors:Henri
Coulette was my first poetry teacher, a recent graduate of
the Writers Workshop, and a native Angeleno. His first poem
I studied was one called “Intaglio” written in
iambic pentameter, about ‘three girls and a boy in
a paper hat,’ whom the poet allowed to grow up in the
storyline of the poem. Later, I met the woman who’d
drawn the ‘intaglio,’ Sylvia Petrie, whose husband
was a classmate in the Writers Workskop, Paul Petrie, who
spent most of his career at URI in Kingston, RI. He’s
now retired and I never met him but he was good enough, as
a poet, to be poet laureate. Coulette, Wirt Williams, and
Christopher Isherwood were my three influences as an undergraduate.
Isherwood didn’t believe in teaching ‘writing’ but
brought his friends to class he taught as his specialty, “Literature
Between the Wars,” all English writers: Auden, Huxley,
Charles Laughton (his next door neighbor), Elsa Lancaster,
Gerald Heard, Stephen Spender. Isherwood’s father died
in World War I, which he never mentioned; he encouraged me
to write plays about characters I knew or invented; then
he’d suggest I send them off to Encounter Magazine,
which was edited by S. Spender. Within a week I had all manuscripts
returned, mostly without comment. With so many visitors dropping
by unannounced you were fearful of missing class. Even after
working graveyard shift.
Favorite
Poets and Artists: Musicians to begin with: Parker,
Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, John Coltrane. “Bags & Trane” because
they were innovators and were also pioneers. Then I realized
I wasn’t going to be a musician I just kept reading
in the open stacks, from A to Z. Irwin Swerdlow taught
me O’Neill and his specialty, the Provincetown Players.
He’d taught at Dillard University in New Orleans,
and loaned me his signed copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man. I took his “Epic of Search” and read
all the epics in translation, from Tolstoy to Balzac and
Zola. We quarreled about T. S. Eliot’s “All
God’s Chillun Got Wings,” TSE’s review
of O’Neill’s play, which was terrible. Swerdlow
had the same draft board as Richard Wright in Brooklyn.
When I went to Iowa I went in mid-year having missed the
ESQUIRE symposium on fiction: Mailer, Baldwin, Philip Roth,
in the spring of 1960. Then Roth gave me nine units of “C” in
fiction and a seminar. My paper was on William Golding
and the fable. Isherwood had loaned me three of Golding’s
novels published in the UK; also the plays of Arnold Wesker.
Roth accused me of writing a ‘pornographic novella’ before Portnoy’s
Complaint, an eighty-page tour de force told from the
point of view of an altar boy full of catechism and fantasy.
Obviously I had read James Joyce and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s
Blues,” which was published in the same issue of
Partisan Review (1957) with the one essay on Golding’s
work reviewed in America, and that volume stolen from the
library. So Mr. Roth and I went to war over politics and
aesthetics. No doubt his intentions were honorable; mine
were not. I knew that Baldwin, born in 1924 in Harlem,
and me, born in Brooklyn, 1938 did not know each other;
in fact, we were not from the same neighborhood. Baldwin
was from DeWitt Clinton and I from P.S. 25. And the story
goes on, but not here.
Gwendolyn Brooks gave me my
career by selecting my first book, Dear John, Dear Coltrane from
the slush pile at Pittsburgh where she was one of the judges.
Brooks also taught me how to write a concise ballad; her “We
Real Cool” is the best urban ballad I know; my first
ballad was on Bessie Smith. I stole the refrain line from
Billie Holiday’s “Love & Romance”—Brooks
wrote me an unsolicited letter about my book, then entitled Black
Spring, which I had to change because of conflict with
Henry Miller’s novel, a novel which I’d actually
read. Then I was nominated for the National Book Award in
Poetry. I did not win, but I had my ‘fifteen minutes
of fame.’ I was one of the initiators of a Ralph Ellison
Festival on his retirement from NYU as Schweitzer Professor
of Humanities at Brown University. I also published Robert
Hayden’s American Journal (Effendi Press) in
limited edition, when Hayden was consultant-in-poetry at
the Library of Congress, now poet laureate. And I selected
Sterling A. Brown’s Collected Poems for the
National Poetry Series in 1980, then presented a copy of
the book to Gunnar Myrdal, author of An American Dilemma,
and resident of Stockholm, Sweden. Brooks, Ellison, Hayden,
Brown. All were pioneers. All were touched by The Federal
Writers Project of their various neighborhoods. I also had
the pleasure of writing their citations as honorands at Brown
University, along with Stevie Wonder, Nathan A. Scott, Jr.,
Maya Angelou, and Chinua Achebe.
Challenges:The
birth of my three children, and the death of two others of
hyaline membrane disease/respiratory distress syndrome.
Professionally,
the friendship of President Howard Swearer, Brown University,
who named me to the Israel J. Kapstein Professorship in English.
He was the model for national service I most admired. I was
never a joiner. I refused to pledge fraternities or participate
in hazing. I lived in San Francisco during the 60’s
as the only city I felt comfortable in without any sense
of belonging. Having lost my first homeland I found I could
live anywhere: as long as I could ‘hear the people
talk’ and not look back: someone might be gaining on
you.
The titles
of my books are my indebtedness to storytelling. I usually
had a title before I’d written the script so finding the texts was my ‘equipment
for living.’ I been down so long that down don’t
worry me; ‘and when I worries, I sleep.’
Advice:Metaphor
is the most important conveyance for civic responsibility,
what we call ‘citizenship’ where mistakes are
opportunities. Meet Life’s Terms But Never Accept Them.
Or, as Jean Toomer, author of Cane and Essentials would
say, “Let the doing be the exercise, not the exhibition.”
Your
competition is the ancestors in the best libraries anywhere;
read Lincoln’s speeches
for economy and originality; read the law so you can construct
good sentences. Revise...revise. Always trust your instincts
if you have no other guidelines, but do your own research.
And don’t be afraid to’ “change the gender” (which
means to give your best rhetorical impulse that challenges
your own “mechanical” thinking.) #
