Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry [1 ed.] 9781612777818, 9780873388108

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Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry

Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry

Ronald Primeau

The Kent State University Press KENT AND LONDON

Frontis: Martin at the Museumof AfricanAmericanHistory, Detroit, October 1997. , Photo by ScottHagen.

© 2004 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2003021741 ISBN 0-87338-793-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-87338-810-0 (paper) Manufactured in the United States of America 08

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Primeau, Ronald. Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American tradition in poetry / Ronald Primeau.

p.

em.

"A select bibliography of works by Herbert W. Martin, 1955-2003": p. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-87338-793-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 0-87338-810-0 (paper: alk. paper) 1.

Martin, Herbert Woodward. 2. Poets, American-s-zoth century-Biography.

3. African American artists-Biography. 4. African American poets-Biography. 5. African Americans in literature. 1. Title. PS3563.A724Z842004 811'.54-dc22 2003021741 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

Forthe newfamily in ourfamily: Beth, Scott, and Isabel

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments 1

Child of the Depression

ix 1

Reconstructingthe ChildhoodApprenticeshipYears 2

Contrapuntal Imagination

21

FromCoffeehouses to New York the Nine Million and Other Poems 3 Sight-Reading Dunbar

47

TheReluctant Partnershipof Two Dayton Laureates 4 "Interrupted Rhythms"

64

From The Shit-Storm Poems to The Persistence of the Flesh 5 Empowering Audiences

88

A Vision of Community in My Mother's Voice and Final W 6 Celebrations

107

The Forms of Silence and the Seedsof New Projects 7 Reclaiming History

129

The Log of the Vigilante and The Last Days of William Short 8 Paul Laurence Dunbar and Herbert Woodward Martin in

Their Own Voices

150

Martin the Dunbar Scholar 9 A Sound Outside of His Head

166

The Poetas OperaLibrettist 10

Remembrances and New Directions Galilee's Suns and A Matter of Honor

190

Conclusion

208

Appendix: A Brief Herbert Woodward Martin Chronology

215

~otes

218

Works Cited

222

A Select Bibliography of Works by Herbert W. Martin, 1955-2003

227

Index

237

Preface and Acknowledgments

Quiet is a word repeated often in poems by Herbert Woodward Martin. A quiet, lyrical tone pervades the music of his poetry. In public performances, he projects a softness commanding attention. One of his collections is entitled The Formsof Silence; even his loudest volume, The Shit-Storm Poems, features the poem "Quietly, Quietly, They Remembered Those Who Died." There has been very little shouting in Martin's creative output, even in decades when confrontation was the norm. Martin's complex artistry is forceful. His first book rewrote conventional poetic forms and created the contrapuntal dialogue, an inventive wizardry with debts to the African American choir, the call-response pattern of slave songs, and the counterpoint music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His poems are always precise and perceptive and sometimes angry. The Persistence of the Flesh includes many quiet prayers that do battle with the madness of war and the iniquity of the heart. In the seventies he challenged "Mr. Charlie," rode into the Wild West with the "negro cowboys," engaged in poetic exorcism, and could swear with the best of them on the page and on the podium. In all, the softness of his voice never turned away from difficult subjects like loneliness, lynchings, and AIDS. The quiet warrior consistently breathed fire into the calm and bittersweet music of his songs. That fire ignited the day I met Martin for the first time in 1971 at a Modern Literature Conference in-appropriately enough-Toledo, Ohio. For nearly two decades, Toledo had been Martin's home. He went to high school and college there, and he and his mother lived in a house nearly in the backyard of the famous Toledo art museum. The conference had been organized by, among others, Martin's mentors and longtime friends at the University

of Toledo, Noel Stock and Wally Martin. It was a star-studded event with many distinguished papers and keynote speeches. In retrospect, I recall that the proceedings drifted in and out of the safe and the serene. The program featured some excellent presentations, whereas one of the keynoters lapsed in and out of the pedestrian. In one of the more memorable question-and-answer sessions I can recall, a member of the audience launched a missile up toward the stage. "With all due respect," the soft-spoken questioner warmed up, "I believe your lecture shows you don't have the slightest idea what is happening in contemporary literature." Needless to say, this observation got a great deal of attention. "In fact," the voice grew a bit louder and carried more indignation than we are used to hearing at that kind of conference, "you don't seem to have any idea what young writers and readers care about right now." The room grew very quiet and the solitary, clear, forceful, yet soft voice that I found out later belonged to Herbert W. Martin came to his main point: "You are what is wrong with scholarship that is turning off young people today." At that there was thunderous applause from the floor and alternately bewilderment and indifference from the stage. I wanted to meet that person who challenged a reigning authority. "I'm a writer," he said. "I used to live here but now I teach in Dayton." As he spoke he gathered up his stacks of notebooks, copies of his first book, and many untidy anthologies with note cards emerging every which way. He rewound his tape recorder and spoke a few words into it before inviting my wife and me to a party with friends. "A few other writers will be there," he assured us. I thanked him and told him we probably would not make the party. I tried to convey how much I agreed with the objections he had raised from the floor. I was impressed. I wanted to see his poems, hear him read, and learn more about what enabled him so creatively to disrupt so large a group of credentialed curmudgeons. "Well, that's awfully nice of you," he said two or three times to my compliments, and he seemed almost to be composing something in his head amidst all the fidgeting as we talked. I told him I would be in touch when I got back home. I called. Yes, he did readings, and yes, he would be pleased to come up to Michigan. Much happened over the next year. Martin read his poems to an audience of more than 250 later that year at Central Michigan University, where I was teaching. He also began to plan a project that would redirect his own work and the direction of many African American poets for several decades. In 1972 he organized and hosted at the University of Dayton the Paul Laurence Dunbar Centennial Celebration. The event honored what would have been the hundredth birthday of the poet he was said to resemble x

Preface and Acknowledgments

from his boyhood. There, established scholars such as Saunders Redding and emerging writers such as Alice Walker shared a very different kind of academic stage. On that podium Margaret Walker taught everyone how to read Dunbar the way they had forgotten they had heard in their youth. Of course I went to Dayton along with two colleagues and five Central Michigan University students, and I like to think we helped out just a little. Dayton was also quiet. The Dunbar Centennial was soul-searching. In succession a distinguished company of poets reflected about how important Dunbar had been to them. The ensemble of poets and scholars brought his work to life by performing his entire canon over the course of the twoday commemoration. Etheridge Knight reminded us it was the "holiest of acts" to pronounce-in near biblical tones-the Word. Nikki Giovanni brought an entourage of enthusiasm. One after another the poets breathed life into Dayton's native son, and Herb Martin took careful notes about the festivities he had planned. Later that year Martin began in earnest what would become his lifelong study of Dunbar the poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and composer of musicals and operas. He began to stage readings that would grow into his acclaimed one-man show. From 1972 on, his own writing developed in tandem with his portrayals of Dunbar's works-an identification that had nagged and even haunted him in his earliest years. Things were different now, as Martin and the other poets and scholars gathered in Dayton that fall gradually came to see. Rather than being a burden, an intimidating influence, or an embarrassment, Dunbar's poems-in dialect and standard English, with humor and irony-exemplified a quiet forcefulness that endures. Many of the poets who assembled in Dayton came back together the next year at Central Michigan University, where Martin was appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor. More than fourteen hundred people came to hear Martin present Dudley Randall, Alice Walker, Quincy Troupe, Alvin Aubert, Etheridge Knight, and Melba Boyd. Over the next three decades Martin absorbed the beat of Dunbar's songs into his own music. In lyrical poems and long narratives, in scholarly studies, plays, and opera librettos, he expressed the multivocal richness of authentic experience. In published volumes as well as in performances on stages around the world, he has given voice to people from history and from the experiences of our everyday lives. Quietly, he has empowered the forgotten, the overlooked, and the oppressed. This book follows the chronology of Martin's life and trace~ the overlapping and intersecting of his ventures into various art forms over the decades. The first two chapters recall his childhood and apprenticeship years first in Alabama and Toledo, Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

then in New York City, where he tried his hand at composition and performance in theater, music, and poetry. Chapter 3 examines the dynamics of his lifelong relationship with Paul Laurence Dunbar-a partnership that touched all his efforts and achievements. Chapters 4 through 6 explore the wide range of his volumes of poems, from the politically charged in The Shit-Storm Poems (1973) to the imagistic precision of The Persistence of the Flesh (1976), the visual experimentation of TheForms of Silence (1980), then the attention to voice and the expansion of audience in My Mother's Voice and Final W (works in progress). The last four chapters review developments that overlap and influence each other right up to the present moment: the reenactment and reclaiming of history in the various versions of TheLogof the Vigilante from 1976 to 2000 (chapter 7), his discovery of and interpretive commentaries on lost and unpublished Dunbar manuscripts (chapter 8), his new career as an opera librettist and creator of other musical forms from the oratorio to the requiem mass (chapter 9), his retrospective look back to childhood and the memorials and tributes to a variety of mentors in Galileo 'sSuns,AMatter ofHonor, and an array ofworks in progress (chapter 10). A review of Martin's diverse accomplishments looks not only at four decades of experimentation and cross-pollenization but ahead as well, down several paths he has cleared for himself recently. Two bibliographies map out, first, works published by Martin between 1955 and 2002 and then a list of sources I have consulted for this study. Throughout the text, citations to Martin's works will be found in the Works Cited section, with unpublished manuscript material located in the Herbert W. Martin Papers (HWMP) at the University of Toledo. "A Select Bibliography of Works by Herbert W. Martin: 1955-2003" is arranged chronologically. This book is a culmination of three decades of observation and research on a career of great variety and continuous surprise. Many people have been supportive and encouraging along the way, and they deserve my heartfelt thanks. Herb's family members have always been gracious and cooperative. Willie Mae Martin, Herb's late mother, shared her always-valuable insights and always-delicious sweet potato pie when we visited following a performance. Herb's wife Sue has been patient and generous with her time whenever I asked questions she had no doubt heard many times before. Their daughters Sarah and Julia and granddaughters Christian, Marina, and Athena Rose have always greeted my work with good cheer. Cousins Lynn Cheryl and Mary Ann also helped me understand some family history.

xii

Preface and Acknowledgments

Numerous talented and generous people read portions of the manuscript at various stages and either set me straight or helped clear new paths. My daughter Sarah Primeau and my longtime friend and mentor Jack Stillinger read the entire work patiently and with real savvy. Their pointed yet gentle admonitions are a treasure. Several other trusted advisers guided and prodded at the right times and in the right ways. Poet Dave Shevin provided many new ways for me to rethink conventional research. Barry Alford listened to me think out loud during long walks and said just enough to help me get unstuck. David and Pat Anderson-and many others at the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature-nurtured this project and me through their own priceless example for more than thirty years. lowe a considerable debt to my students who have listened to me and talked to me about their views on the works of Herbert W. Martin. I am also grateful for the advice, assistance, and encouragement of Jim Born, Henry Louis Gates [r., Stephen Holder, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, David Ling, Mahmoud Moursi, Mary Obuchowski, Peter Obuchowski, Rene Shingles, Carol Swan, John Sydor, Stacy Thompson, and Miller Williams. And how can I forget my colleague John Pfeiffer and the late Martha Brown, with whom I made the pilgrimage to the Dunbar Centennial in 1972? Much of the work for this project was born there. Over many years this book has grown out of several different projects. Portions of the analysis of "The Deadwood Dick Poems" appeared in MidAmerica1(1973), the inaugural annual publication of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. I met Herb Martin and joined the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature in September and October 1971, and both meetings showed me what genuine and caring scholarship in our profession ought to be. Portions of my discussion of Herbert Woodward Martin as a Dunbar scholar have appeared in slightly different form in In His Own Voice: TheDramatic and Other Uncollected WorksofPaulLaurenceDunbar (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2002). I am grateful to the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and Ohio University Press for their permission to use that material here. During my research the staff at the Canaday Center at the University of Toledo Library-especially Barbara Floyd-has been warmly welcoming and insightful. Thank you also to Laura Micham, formerly of the University of Toledo, now at Emory University. Their work on "The Herbert W. Martin Papers, 1940-2003" is a model achievement. The collection is clear and accessible in the story it tells and the enjoyment it provides. Thank you as well to the faculty, students, and administration of the University of Dayton, who

Preface and Acknowledgments

xiii

welcomed me often and provided helpful insights about Herb's life and work. As always I appreciate the support of Central Michigan University. Many of the chapters that follow were made possible through a sabbatical leave and through funding for various conference presentations. Through many drafts and then more revisions and the considerable confusion I often create, Carole Pasch has been invaluable. During her patient reworking of several drafts, she has been a steady source of wise advise, cheerful encouragement, and undaunting reliability. My own family somehow knows just how to be there for whatever I need. To my wife, Katherine; to our daughter, Beth Hopson, and her husband, Scott Hopson, and our granddaughter, Isabel; to our daughter, Sarah Primeau, and to Brian Darling; to Jane, Art, Betsy, and Maggie Langland; and to my favorite octogenarian, Ruth Dreyer-thank you all for being who you are. And, of course: thanks, Herb-for speaking out in Toledo and everywhere else before and after. Thank you also for never putting your phone or e-mail in vacation mode while I tracked you all over the world with endless inquiries. To all these busy and generous and talented people, I am grateful.

xiv

Preface and Acknowledgments

·1·

Child of the Depression Reconstructing the Childhood Apprenticeship Years

One evening shortly after I began working on this book, I had dinner with Herb Martin following a class he had taught in Detroit. It was a light meal at a noisy sports bar; it was late, and another class meeting was scheduled for early the next morning. When we asked for the check, he requested a doggie bag that turned out to be a large Styrofoam box that would hold a treasury of leftovers. I remembered other scenes of what I was about to observe, but this time the sorting and saving caught my eye a little longer. There was a portion of a hamburger remaining, some fries, a pickle or two, a little slaw, and a couple of unopened condiment packs. All that went into the box neatly and was followed by the dinner rolls from across the table, a few crackers, plastic silverware, and a few carefully refolded hardly touched napkins. Oh yes, a small supply of sugar packets-in all, nothing a customer was not entirely entitled to but a performance worthy of at least some teasing. "Youreally are a child of the depression," I remarked gently. He laughed, gave me a long, whimsical look, and closed up the box. For a while I thought nothing more about what did not seem so surprising after all. But a fuller response was on its way. Working out the details took him the rest of the evening, early the next morning, and a few revision sessions over the next day or two. What emerged within a matter of hours was a poem called "Depression Child," which after an all's-fair-in-war-and-writing epigraph ("You are a true child of the depression," Ron Primeau)-begins: "Yes. You are right. / Cousin Louise taught me to save everything. / My wife on the other hand calls me a rat-pack of effluvium. / But we saved everything: / The wax paper which came wrapped around the bread; / The unburned bacon grease for further cooking; / Small pieces of soap, to be boiled together / to make newer bars" ("Herbert W. Martin Papers" at the • 1 •

University of Toledo," hereafter HWMP). The reference to being perhaps an overly committed saver of everything had slipped from my lips once or twice, but the phrase "rat-pack of effluvium" sent me to my American Heritage dictionary. Martin's wife is a poet who tends to select words with precision, but I had not thought in terms of collecting "outflows of vapor or particles" or "foul smelling fumes emanating from decaying matter." For the next day's class Martin included as well a position paper on how the poem came into being, and he performed the poem for his students and shared the behind-the-scenes details. The catalog of what he remembers saving is impressive: "The smallest thing was wealth: / Rolled paper becomes logs for the fireplace; / Swatches of cloth and paper sealed the drafts and chinks / in the house and replaced worn portions of quilts / which told our family history and kept us warm" ("Depression Child," HWMP). The Great Depression created all this need as well as the assurance that everything had a purpose. The speaker of the poem remembers that people were angry: "Anger was our shaken fists. / The bottoms were Hoover's tight ass, hard as a thin dime Uncle Ad. / always said. He smiled thinking if we held those fists / tight long enough Hoover would become constipated." The list of objects saved, reused, and recycled is long and the rituals worked like "communal witchcraft." The speaker is lulled back to the realization that he was too young to know if any of this worked. "But," he concludes, "the country soon got rid of" Hoover and replaced him with "a man who was too young to be afraid of anything, even fear itself." The position paper arose over the next week in response to several questions that students had asked in his class-about inspiration and how a poet controls meaning in a poem. He discusses how poets listen for cues and then act like investigators looking for motivation, including what works and discarding what becomes irrelevant. Ultimately "you have to access that which is human" in a poem: "if it walks and talks like the human beings we know then we buy into the situation" (HWMP). Even as a very early draft, "Depression Child" walked and talked very well. We are transported back to the feel of the Depression-in a force so strong to be still motivating his "waste not, want not" philosophy. We are introduced as well to Cousin Louise and Uncle Ad, and this poem is no doubt in large measure autobiographical. But the poem also raises the question about whether what we are reading actually happened back in the forties or whether it is the poet's imaginative re-creation of places, events, and voices that reminds us of what it means to be human. The poem reminds us as well of another lesson Martin learned from his relatives: even the smallest amount of food saved from the master's table might feed several slaves for days. 2

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmericanTradition in Poetry

Martin was born and spent his earliest years in Birmingham, Alabama; moved with his parents to Toledo, Ohio, as a teenager; and was educated in Toledo, as well as in New York, Vermont, and Pennsylvania. He has lived and worked in many places-in the South and Midwest, on the East Coast, and in Europe-and has logged another whole life on the road performing in plays as well as in his one-man poetry shows. Across the globe he has engaged in many artistic endeavors: he has sung professionally in churches and on stage, acted in and written :f?lays, published six books of poems and several opera librettos, taught at several universities, and is a Paul Laurence Dunbar scholar. His efforts in each of these literary forms influence his work in genres and venues to create an intricate artistic tapestry. Foremost to an understanding of how his art developed are his periods as an apprentice growing up in Birmingham and Toledo and his reaching maturity living and working in New York City. "Depression Child" takes us back in time to Alabama and the events and people of Martin's youth. But how much we can uncover about what actually happened is perhaps less crucial than our experiencing the artist's reconstruction of that past in the writing and performance of the word. The poet today continues to save everything in doggie bags, Styrofoam boxes, and a rat-pack of effluvium long after prosperity has displaced the need that was felt during the Depression, because he is saving the places, people, events, and voices of what makes us human. Martin put it this way in the poem: "We were never so careless as to think we could do without our lives / And therefore throw ourselves out of the first available window." Life during the Depression taught people how to conserve what they had and how to make multiple uses out of scarce resources. In ways that parallel this process of saving as well as constructing uses and meanings, artists remember and reconstruct using structures very much like bricolage. In "Fire, Water, and the Ashes of Memory," Martin tells a story that explains what is for him the power of naming and remembering. While creating the first draft of his paper, Martin "inadvertently touched the wrong computer key and all S8o-plus lines disappeared from the screen" (in Shelnutt, Elephants.' Extensive efforts to retrieve the text failed, and "the pages were all consigned to the vast memory bank of experience and lessons learned." At that point the real work of writing began as he was forced to "rummage through the smoldering ashes hoping to find a memento of some excellent event." The act of creation at this point involved not just memory but a purposeful reconstruction and the lessons learned when even the immediate past is not easily retrieved. The vanishing of the text from the screen is an eerie image that underscores the mysterious ways in which Childof the Depression

3

memory works in the composing process. As he worked through the frustrations, he searched within for "something fused together from the fire which will help me to remember to be careful in the future and to find a space where I can dedicate in peace and recall in joy, a place where my senses can evoke memories in their full array of colors, textures, rhythms, sounds, tastes, and smells." In other words, the keyboard glitch was fortuitous. The suddenly clean slate forced the complex variety of conservations and reconstructions to set imagination in motion. Not unlike the sugar bags turned inside out to become brown paper bags, the jelly tins nailed against rat holes, or the Styrofoam box filled up with leftovers, the writer's reconstruction of what has faded creates something new even as it holds on to what is old. Memory is deceptive, Martin maintains, maybe even defective, but it is the writer's job to reengage that process of naming, storing, and interpreting in the best ways possible. "After the experience is over, he starts inventing in the retelling. Often his goal is to make the actual events more succinct, mysterious, or suspenseful. So while we can never actually know what happened to the young poet during the Depression or what Cousin Louise or Uncle Ad actually said, we can look to the artistic preservation-with its imaginative reconstruction-to approach perhaps the deeper truths. "It is as if I am putting the essence of the story in a vial to be preserved," he observes, "and in so doing I alter, change, and revise so that it becomes almost unrecognizable from the initial occurrence" (344). Composition is, then, for Martin even in its earliest stages a revision or a seeing and experiencing of events and people again and again: "What we do when we do it over is to strengthen some moments which seem lax, and loosen others which seem too tight. In effect, creative writing is the altering of reality. The best a creative writer can do is to approximate reality, to represent it as closely as possible" (344). At its best, then, the imaginative re-creation includes the precision and detail that enable others to experience places they have never been, people they have never met, and events they have never encountered. Trying to determine what actually happened, for example, in Birmingham, Toledo, and New York City during his formative years is, of course, significant to a comprehension of his work-but coming to understand how the accumulating memories and imaginative reconstructions forged into an artistic vision may be more intriguing and rewarding. Fortunately, Martin has provided records of his memories and reconstructions in journals and scrapbooks, in successive drafts of poems, in memoirs and critical essays, and in performances (some recorded) on stages across the world where he has indulged in the power of naming and retelling his own works and the works of others. It is perhaps as a performance artist that his revising can be seen most clearly. 4

HerbertWoodwardMartin and theAfricanAmericanTradition in Poetry

Each evening he makes adjustments that preserve and-at the same timereinvent what went into that evening's vial. Emphasizing how all creativity requires experience and imagination, Martin warns that the line between these elements is often close to being indistinguishable. When it is finally impossible to tell where experience ends and imagination begins-at that magical point the mixture can be exactly right. At the core he is as polyvocal and multifaceted as the myriad of experiences and the range of imagination that have shaped his interests and motivations. "I try to learn and understand what my fingertips might meaningfully have to say. 1 try to hear what the grass and water whisper to each other. 1 try to watch as the daylight and nightlight bathe each other. 1 try to taste the perfumes of the air and smell the gloriousness of the world, which is always there at the bend leading to the next universe" ("Fire" 355). Martin's writing provides considerable reconstruction of his apprenticeship years growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, and Toledo, Ohio. His critical essays, memoirs, and interviews fill in details and help his readers locate places and people. Journals, notebooks, diaries, and scrapbooks preserve small memories of earlier times. Letters, appointment books, programs from performances, news releases, reviews, course syllabi, and comments from students create a picture of a multifaceted career unfolding. Emerging from the memoirs is what he likes to call a fictional or imaginative childhood-or those re-creations of what the computer screen had erased. This chapter looks at the years 1933-1960, from birth and childhood through his high school and early college years in Toledo. The next chapter will turn to the sixties, with an emphasis on his New York City experiences. What does it mean when someone saves so much material for more than fifty years? Was there a sense of mission or destiny in that student poet of the 1950S, a clear desire to be famous? Did he plan that each singing job, teaching assignment, or writing project would be valuable in itself and would participate in a larger multidisciplinary artistry? Or was it the box of leftovers reinforcing the value of making use-multiple use-of everything? Saving so many documents also means that one's involvement in each process of creation is itself at least as important as the end result and that there is considerable value even in projects that fail to reach total fruition. Whatever else is true about how and why we keep records of what quickly becomes the past, the things Martin saved for us makes it possible to study the ingredients that shaped his multivocal achievements. Martin was born on October 4, 1933, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father was a foundry worker, and his mother was trained as a beautician but worked as a domestic. He is an only child and one of six first cousins. His mother Childof the Depression

5

Herbert Martin 's mother, Willie Mae, as a young woman. Courtesy of th e estate of Willie Ma e Martin.

was the youngest of three children ; her brother and sister left home earl y, and she saw them again only at their mother's funeral. Martin 's father read mysteries and detective stories at night, and the famil y played game s telling tall tales about "coach-whip snakes that could bite their tales, turn themselves into wheels, and overtake any escaping human being, and with a body and a tail bind them up , and with that same vicious tail drain all the blood from an individual" ("Fire " 347). He loved the challenge, the battle, the contest that pitted human against animal wit and intelligence. "Almost never," he still sees clearly, "did the human win or escape." Going to sleep was frequently a problem, particularly when cou sin Billy's "Big Foot" could be heard "climbing up the back stairs to our bedroom to kidnap us and devour us from head to toe, all the while licking his bloody chops in delight" (347). 6

Herbert Woodward Martin and th e Af rican American Tradition in Poetry

Fear, then, was often the order of the day. He wonders later whether his terror arose from his cousin's vivid imagination or his own gullibility. "Herbert, your feet are on fire," Billy would yell as Cousin Louise and Uncle Ad would jump up from in front of the serene fire and wrap up Herbert to save him from burning (347). Looking back, he somehow refrains from blaming his cousin for the pranks. Billy wanted action when everyone was about to doze around the fire: "He simply needed active people around him, not sedentary ones." One of Martin's most vivid memories is Uncle Ad's explosions after he discovered he had been duped: "Boy, is you got good sense?" He came away from the experiences wanting to explore these and other events through the images he would create as a writer: "I tell you these things because I have only in the last ten to fifteen years looked at these events and begun to try to make poems from them. I hasten to say that many of them have been altered and some others invented. They are not all about me though they have passed through my imagination" (348). And so Martin's truths of a childhood in Alabama are written into what he has called fictionalized accounts. Fear was a dominant emotion in so many of the experiences. The Martin family told each other stories in front of the fire. They laughed at Amos 'n' Andy on the radio or "were frightened out of our wits" by Inner Sanctum. He recalls as well his father's fascination with detective stories, science magazines, and pulp fiction while his "mother was engrossed in the Bible." Everyone shared "stories of heroes." The terrors of that period arose from more than the tall tales or the pranks of older children. He is clear on how "much of my fears of water, policemen, and dogs" come from those years in Birmingham. In one vivid week of terror a white family had identified Martin's family as rock throwers who had caused them injuries. According to Martin, however, during the alleged attack they were "at church practicing our Easter speeches" (348). In spite of their parents' efforts to defend them, "we were found guilty by the attending police and our parents were instructed to beat us with an ironing cord." He was somehow saved from the beating, and the questions that linger in his memory speak to the imaginative re-creations to which he is increasingly drawn: "I wonder where all those people-black and white-are? Some no doubt are still alive, some dead, some with children of their own, some with renewed and fortified prejudices, some reformed with no prejudices at all, some with newer crosses to bear, some with better visions, all far removed from me, but not the experience located somewhere beneath the scar of memory" (348). The challenge presented is what to preserve or revise and what stories, poems, plays, and operas can be created. Childof the Depression

7

David Martin, Herbert Martin's father, Birmingham, Alabama. Courtesy of the estate of Willie Mae Martin.

Not every memory of this time is a scar, and some of the happy memories led to rituals of artistry that would triumph over the unexplained puzzles of childhood. He can still reenact the elaborate funeral ceremonies he and his friends would perform for dead birds or rabbits. There would be prayers and singing and liturgical ritual and stories that might soothe if not explain some of death's mysteries. Always and alr~ady so early these children would in biblical fashion pronounce the Word, and that power of naming became a creation all its own. Religion, in fact, was central in his childhood. In a notebook written while he was a student at the University of Toledo, Martin records an earlier version of his memories of that ill-fated Easter week. 2 Like most musical practices, he recalls, it did include "a wild chase and a near frolic over the entire sanctuary," and he could not help but wonder if the white family's false accusations were not part of some kind of retribu8

Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry

tion for not getting much accomplished at church: "I suppose we had to pay somehow for disturbing the peace and quiet of the trinity from the last meetings, shouts and Amens." This time when he tells the story, the details are more brutal and the lesson seems to dominate. The accusation was that Cousin Billy and his friend Charles Brown had injured some chickens. Martin continues: "Also my friend who we all called endearingly Brother was condemned by the police to be whipped by our parents while they watched. I was not identified and felt sorry and cried just the same. Not knowing justice is eternally blindfolded, I thought Jesus was pretty mad at us for not behaving in his church. This led me to think he was pretty mean at the time. When I was older, he became my savior." Martin recalls the emotion of that week of his salvation. The revival began on a Monday night when the church shook with "amens" and shouts as the congregation regretted its sinful ways. He also recalls being quite conflicted about the experience and getting himself in a good deal of trouble. "I sat there amused," he recalls, "as the Evangelist preached us to salvation." He remembers being one among the many who left the mourner's bench that evening and, "as fate would have it," the next day back at the movies to see "how the good man was able to be relieved from the serial trap." He found the movie "thrilling and even more so probably because I had sneaked out right after my salvation." Needless to say, his mother guessed what was going on and it was back to the bench the next night-but with an enduring realization: "I rejoined again that Tuesday night believing that any zeal or love or salvation had not diminished one bit by my having kept up with my chapter. After all, I had heard someone say that 'religion was never designed to make our pleasures less.'" Memories of growing up in Alabama are not prominent in Martin's earliest published poems or in the plays he wrote in the sixties and seventies. In fact, it is not until the late 1990S that he returns increasingly to memories of his childhood in the South. In the poems of Calileo 's Suns (1999) and the unpublished collection Southern Voices (HWMP) he surmises that a large repertoire of Southern voices may yet emerge from his imagination. In a notebook accompanying several works in progress he describes listening to, preserving, and revising "a community of people black and white, young and old, rough and sophisticated desiring to whisper to me some hitherto unthought of complication" (HWMP). Some of the stories are emerging in short prose poems that he calls "small memories." He remembers that in the summers when she could afford it, Cousin Lou would take the children on vacation to Selma, and for a diversion they were taken into the fields and shown how to pick cotton. They filled five-pound Childof the Depression

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Herbert Woodward Martin as a child in Birmingham, Alabam a, Easter, 1937 or 1938. Courtesy of th e estate of Willie Ma e Martin.

flour sacks, but "given our body size the bags certainly seemed larger. "3One day Herbert's cousin Lou died while he was in town or at a movie , and the neighborhood friends decided the best way to inform him was as a Greek chorus : "Herbert , your grandmother is dead. " He recalls responding, "She 's not my grandmother" and running to find out if it was true. The three-room house was cleared, and the funeral visitation was held at home. "Crepe was hung over the door of the house to denote someone's passing. " When he was a small boy, Uncle Ad and Cousin Lou gave Herbert a pet pig that he became very attached to. One day he came home from school to disco ver that his pet had been "slaughtered and was splayed up in the air." The family had decided it was best not to tell him what in their economic situation had to be done. Martin recalls that the pain was "th underous." Cousin Lou explained that "the family would be kept from starving over the winter," but the boy took days to calm down and refused another pet. Only twenty years later when living in New York would he take "a siamese cat whose tail was defective. " 10

Herbert Woodwa rd Martin and th e Af rican American Traditi on in Poetry

She became Antigone in the poems in New York the NineMillion and OtherPoems (1969) and disappeared while under his Buffalo roommate's care when Martin went off to graduate school. The most vivid of these early memories work their way into poems that re-create what he has called"a fictional childhood I that has more interesting details than I a murder or one single lynching." "Birmingham is the city of my imagination," he begins in an untitled poem in Southern Voices (HWMP). The poem provides an imaginative revisiting of a catalog of experiences: "a volley of notes bouncing from one I measure to the next like the old singing I movie balls which encouraged the patrons to I utter forth sound from their guts like I inspired Moses who had within his grip I all the commands of Heaven and could do I nothing less or more than follow orders." He recalls being suffocated by the dust of a summer day and smothered by Alabama humidity: "Nothing ever grew or was lexpected to grow in the yards except a few I four 0' clock bushes which bloomed in the I strict summertime at the proper hour." Even their fragrance was "suppressed by the heat and by I morning they had closed into a tight fist I that gave no hint of life or possibility I of rebirth." All they grew to expect was the inevitability of death: "We were I expected to die naturally, cause no wonder, I demand no autopsy, die naturally of neglect." These are experiences which remain with the poet and are captured through fiction writing and creative expression: "This is the memory I fled when I was twelve.... It was a part of my southern heritage that I would never I lose like my blood count high with the I energy of survival as if someone had I poured thermometer quicksilver into my veins I which allowed me to survive the abuse I of sunshine exciting as that may seem to I the ear of anyone living in central Ohio." Whatever that child of the Depression saved and re-created stayed with him for multiple uses throughout his career: "But my southern birth and nurturing was I good for dissipation and testament and I colorful enough to last a million years." Many of Martin's poems contribute to his composite portrait of a "fictional childhood." He wrote several poems first for the unpublished Southern Voices and then moved them into Galileo's Suns (1999) and TheLogo! the Vigilante (2000). These include "A Childhood Memory," "Playing until Forgetfulness Comes," "Dark Pronouncements," and "The Washerwoman's Fire." These poems as well as working notes for a memoir take us back to the erased computer screen, the Styrofoam doggie box filled with leftovers, and the activity of the reconstructive imagination. "I was sent to the store often," Martin recalls in one of those brief memoirs, speaking of himself at the age of eight. Herbert got the chore, in part, because Cousin Billy was Childof the Depression

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smart enough to stay at school, lose the list, or forget what he was sent to get. "It was not a good thing to complain within the hearing of a relative so I simply did what I was asked to do" (notebook in HWMP). Here are those memories worked into the poem "My Mother Told Me Once": "Because I was not likely to lose the money / nor stray from the narrow beaten path ... I was the one sent to pay the urgent bills / Or sent to the local grocer at the top of the hill / Which divided the blacks from the whites" (Southern Voices, HWMP). The poem focuses on Biggy Man, the Italian merchant, who paid attention to the wives and got their credit, and the lessons that emerged: "In the end we thought what are a few extra pennies worth / when you are in a hurry and a hungry man / needs to eat before he can go to work." Similarly, "American Gothic" presents humor with an edge and draws attention to the truth of the poet's fictionalizing. "There is no southern record of my mother or father standing / next to each other with uncommon grace like these two stand," the poet begins: "If they were next to each other it was with the pitch forks / aimed solidly at each other's heart." They stood there, if at all, out of a sense of fate and a feeling of being forced to occupy those spaces. Their lives were "work, eating for renewed strength, sleep, and then work again" (Southern Voices). The poet-narrator concludes by turning the lens on his own processes of naming, imagining, and re-creating what fades from view: "So what would / they think of me now making poems out of their indifference / without the slightest recognition for space, time, community, / love or personal house to thresh out their spare lives in?" The Martin family moved to Ohio in the earliest stages of the post-World War II northern migration. His father and mother settled in Toledo in 1946 and 1947 respectively, and Herbert followed in the winter of 1948. "I remember the conductor coming through the train and announcing 'We have just crossed the Mason and Dixon line.' Settling back into my seat I thought to myself 'That's that.' I didn't look back for almost twenty years and could not have guessed then that my formative years were already set in concrete and hardening. And as I have said earlier, it has only been in recent years that I have begun to mine the wealth contained in those experiences" ("Fire" 351-52). In one of his college journal entries he reflects back on his transition to life up North: "I am very happy about not having to lie my way out of the grips of the South. In most stories it looms like a giant sin. However, if we consider one human factor possessed by all, we will be on the road to understanding its make-up. Emotion" (HWMP). Of course the cement of those early years had not really hardened, and the next twenty years in Toledo and New York City brought new lessons on several fronts. "Toledo amazed me," he later confides in a newspaper inter12

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

Martin at home at 918 Indiana Ave nue, Toledo, Ohio, 1948-1 94 9. Courtesy of th e estate of Willie Ma e Ma rtin.

view with Tom Archdeacon. "The first time I had to go downtown, I got on the bus in front of my father and, as I was accustomed, I went all the way to the back. That's when my father walked back and said just one sentence. 'You don't have to sit in the back any more if you don't want to.' He didn't Child of th e Depression

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explain" (3A-3B). Martin had grown up with the "Colored" and "White" signs, as well as separate restroom and lunch counters. On his way to high school a few months later, he sat right up at the front of the bus: "My father was right. No one said anything. Right then I felt so many things changing. It was like my life was opening up" (3B). In many areas of artistic expression opportunities opened up steadily for Martin. By the time he graduated from Scott High School in June 1951, he had sung in the church choir and in many programs, performed in school skits, read widely in all kinds of literature, and wrote an enormous amount in notebooks, journals, diaries, and school assignments. Looking back to his work in high school, he remembers writing "a series of really dreadful poems" that he claims to have "destroyed so that they can't come back and haunt me" ("The Poet and His Song"). In high school his artistry was already diverse. On the one hand, he wrote a prize-winning poem in honor of contralto Marian Anderson. At the same time, in a school program he sang "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts," and he was accompanied by Grace Frye. He performed in many shows at Scott High School, where he recalls singing "Chew, Chew, Chew Bubble Gum" for a chewing gum song one year and a Nat King Cole-style rendition of "Nature Boy" in a skit. In one of his recent memory poems he pays tribute to "Dolores of my high school days," who was "beautiful long before I knew what women were supposed to be" and "light years ahead of her time." Dolores"died a violent death on the eve of graduation, murdered with shot gun blasts by an older lover." Now the poet sifts through his "scant knowledge of what happened" and hopes that "after some forty years of not remembering that heaven has bestowed upon you all of its graces for dying so young and so soon" (untitled poem in manuscript, HWMP). During his high school years in Toledo he spent considerable time alone while his mother worked as a maid for the Baron family of Baron Steel. Much of the week her job was live-in, and Martin would often accompany his mother to work. He also worked part-time while in school and began reading and writing in ways that became habits for a lifetime. He recalls fondly one of many important teachers in his life-high school homeroom teacher Rosemary Featherstone, who early on taught him to keep his shoulder to the wheel because then two-thirds of the way through any job he would be able to coast to completion. One of Martin's earliest unpublished poems from the 1950S, "Elegy," commemorates the death of Lily E. Baron. "Yesterday the spirit's memory / Creviced in the tender spaces of the brain," he begins in tribute to her passing-"the shroud of darkness mortally giving way / to praise for my lady" (HWMP). The young Martin was developing his craft by writing poems for occasions at this time, including 14

Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry

Martin performing the "Bubble Gum Song"at a Scott High Schoolassembly in Toledo, 194 8. Courtesy of the estate of Willie Mae Martin.

young Robert Baron's bar mitzvah (see chapter 9). "Elegy" reflects Martin's admiration for Mrs. Baron and foreshadows the lyrical and mu sical qualities of his later poems : "I understand the day which broke into tears, / The ashes of corrupted flesh. We are those ideas / Which transform dreams into the holiness of light. / I praise my lady." Over the next ten years, Martin worked in Toledo and attended the University of Toledo. He left the university for an extended time to take a job with World Publishing Company in New York City and came back to graduate from the Uni ver sit y of Toledo in 1964 . Always a performer in music and Childof the Depression

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theater, he remembers many significant teachers and mentors at the university. "When I was an undergraduate, I wrote the typical long Eliotic great poem, I sent it out every day, and it was sent back every day" ("Fire" 34647). In the hallway between classes one day Ernest Gray told him ifhe wanted to be a writer he was going to have to "learn the rules of grammar" before he "could break them" because he would have "some logical reason for doing so." Gray could recognize Martin's deliberate bending of rules and convention and he saw great promise that he did not want to go squandered. The advice "made sense after I calmed down my sophomoric arrogance and thought about what he had said. Besides, he was a considerate man who cared for his students both black and white when it was only fashionable to care for the latter" (346-47). Another University of Toledo professor of great influence was Sarah S. Bissell, who "saw me as a good student and never as separate or incapable." A lifelong mentor-mentee relationship developed with Bissell that had great impact on a variety of works throughout his career. Even criticism from this time had its lasting value as well. He submitted a selection of poems seeking admission to the Blue Key Society, only to hear that one judge had proclaimed his poems to be "the worst things she had ever read." While he did not become a blue key card carrier, the lesson was valuable: "In a matter of days I was writing small, clear poems which I hoped could be understood in any state in the union. So the comment, true or false, was another important juncture in my development as a writer. However much I was frustrated by the moment, I also learned something important about writing.... Clarity and precision are the basic underpinning of communication" (347). Many other frustrations, mentors, opportunities, and a wealth of furious writing awaited Martin over the next decade. His parents had separated, and he and his mother lived at 1834 Glenwood Avenue, the house celebrated in his later poems, across the street from the Toledo Museum of Art. "I missed the fullness of love from my father and I was flooded in affection by my mother," he recalls in a journal entry written as a student at the University of Toledo. David Nathaniel Martin died on Thanksgiving Day, 1967. In another journal entry (April 22, 1952) Martin declares war on a man who made derogatory remarks about him. In a draft of a letter he writes, "Every action stems from one point of motivation that we receive, in the present and in the past.... I am declaring war all and out-not cold but good and hot. Yours forever in war, HM."4 At this time also we see the beginnings of his enormous capacity for establishing contact with famous artists the world over. He had already sent a copy of his prize-winning poem about Marian Anderson to the soprano, and in 1954 he wrote to William 16

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

Warfield inviting him to meet with Martin's writer's group in conjunction with the upcoming engagement in Toledo. On January 31, 1954, Warfield wrote that he would be "pleased to meet with your youth club" but that his contractual obligations prohibited his singing at such events.> Martin worked hard on publicity advertising the concert. During a question-andanswer session, Warfield did go to the piano, and he accompanied himself to sing "Old Man River." During his days as a student at the University of Toledo, the young Martin frequently explained his own thinking on paper and sketched out his theories in the form of letters drafted in notebooks. On September 26, 1953, he wrote, "An object never dies unless we believe it is dead" (HWMP). One of his first published poems appeared in the 1955 edition of AmericaSings. "Imagination is to learn of truth," he declares, but "Invention is to know your heart" ("Invention and Imagination," volume published by the National Poetry Association, HWMP). During his college years Martin began the lifelong habit of carrying notebooks in which he drafted and revised poems and other made-up genres. He would scribble lines on bags, envelopes, napkins, book order forms, class notes, program notes, and even paper plates. The letter form was one of his favorite ways to explore ideas or let off steam. He used small scraps of paper, huge lengths of old-style computer paper, and cardboard. He played with word constructions, shaped small bits of autobiographical reflections, sketched out short plays or scenes for plays, composed papers about writers, contributed book reviews to his journals, recorded debts to various influences, and created many memory poems. In the Toledo years we can see the seeds of the various notebook genres he has created over the last three decades. One entry announces a series of forthcoming interviews with famous authors: "Close Up in the Dressing Room: Earle Hyman, Actor, Interviewed by Herbert Woodward Martin." Another is a poem written on an Elder Beerman ad alongside an eight hundred number for orders in Dayton: "Now falls a steady rain / which will make some people slip / and cause some people pain." He wrote many poems in his journals on vacations in Europe and while on the road performing. In some notebooks he created a scrapbook genre in which drafts of poems are sandwiched in between theater tickets, receipts, postcards, programs, and menus glued together to form a journey record or a collage of experiences. He even wrote poems in appointment books and workbooks used during play productions. One poem called "Scientific Weight" is mounted alongside Smuckers and Gold Medal labels and Richmond, Virginia, Symphony tickets: "Give me a hard fact / an egg with a skeleton / a gust of wind with a visible shape / a fire whose wings can be folded / and a world whose sky can be measured." Childof the Depression

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Martin infront of th e tower at th e University of Toledo, graduation day, 1964. Courtesy of the estate of Willie Ma e Martin.

The label lists "nutri tional information" and u.s. Daily Recommendations; the poem addresses "living things ... not covered / by formulas observable and measurable, / beyond the reach of instruments, theories, or explanations of life." The poem is a multimedia statement. It is a collection of some of those leftovers stuffed into the doggie box. It is a conserving and a revising that reaches a very simple conclusion: in spite of all that can be quanti18

Herbert Woodward Martin and th e Af rican Ame rican Tradition in Poetry

fied, magnified, and measured, in the end "the self must see." This lifelong habit of writing on whatever is available prompted one of his most recent works in progress: On the Fly Leaf, a collection written on the end sheets of books he is reading (see chapter 10). Numerous teachers, classes, mentors, and books made their impressions in Toledo. For a while, Pound and Eliot were the largest influences, he recalls: "Everyone was writing those huge conglomerate poems using German, Sanskrit, French, Italian and any other language we thought was foreign and undecipherable." So many other poets were significant at the time: Auden because he read so well and was so insightful; Marianne Moore and Edith Sitwell sparked his interest in rhythm and experimental structures; Dylan Thomas and the Beats, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who opened up the language. He knew Paul Laurence Dunbar from elementary school (see chapter 3), but his poems dropped out of sight and did not return until Martin was in college. He met Langston Hughes when he read in Toledo in the mid-reyes. At the University of Toledo, in 1952 and 1953, in a sophomore American literature class, he was reintroduced to Dunbar, Hughes, Cullen, McKay, and James Weldon Johnson. He also mentions other influences already becoming a part of his artistry in the 1950S: Pound's musical phrases, Olson's breath, Bach's contrapuntal lines, Mozart, Beethoven, and especially Brahms, whose expansive sense of the universe amazed him. Most of all, the music of the black church was a constant in Martin's life and poetry. He recalls many good teachers from his days at the University of Toledo, including the poet Martin Scholten, Shakespeare and Chaucer scholar James G. Southworth, the poet Ruby Scott, chair of the English department and "a strong supporter" Ernest Gray, and the best of his mentors and teacher of poetry and composition, Sarah Bissell. His academic record at the University of Toledo was generally excellent but had its moments of complexity and extremes. On February 1,1955, A. J. Townsend, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, wrote to Martin's mother as follows: "I am sorry to report that your son Herbert has made a poor record at the University of Toledo.... We do not permit him to remain after he has earned 70 semester hours and does not have a C average. Therefore we must deny him the right to register." Nine years later Martin would graduate. Five years after graduation he would be invited back to perform his poems. And on August 12, 1981, the University of Toledo Office of Public Information issued a twopage press release announcing establishment of the "Herbert Woodward Martin Papers" in the Ward M. Canaday Center for Research and Use of Rare Books and Special Collections. "In recognition of the significance of Dr. Martin's donation," the press release continues, "UT has established Childof the Depression

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the Martin-Bissell-Neuman nursing scholarship in honor of Martin's mother, Professor Bissell, and Irene Neuman," who helped Martin in New York City. "This is a very important gift generating further growth in UT's Black literature collection," noted Canaday Center director David Martz. The press release enumerates Martin's many publications and achievements and recalls that while he was an undergraduate at the University of Toledo, he was published twice in Fiasco, the University of Toledo student literary magazine. His response to the establishment of the collection and the scholarship underscores again his revisions of what is saved in the vial: "In these severe and reversing times it seems that the individual is called upon again to perform freely and givingly for his fellow man. During the years that I attended the University of Toledo that was my privilege from administrators, faculty, and students alike. The scholarship is in some way a continuation of that tradition by which I was taught and now try to teach." With perhaps even more ironies lurking, approximately forty years after Dean Townsend's letter to his mother, Martin's works and life achievements were featured as part of an "Exhibition of UT Notables." In Birmingham and Toledo, Martin collected a great deal that he would save in what became a very large Styrofoam doggie box. The child of the Depression saved everything in order to conserve what was precious and to reuse and reconstruct people, places, and events into a series of imaginative "fictions" that would become his artistry. As he headed east in 1960, he took with him a great deal from his childhood and apprenticeship years. New experiences that would shake up what he stored in that vial awaited him in New York City.

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HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

•2 •

Contrapuntal Imagination From Coffeehouses to New York the Nine Million and Other Poems

Since beginning as a student in 1952, Martin's affiliation with the University of Toledo has been long and extremely successful. Over a half-century of close connections, his career had seen both interruptions and celebrations. He left the University of Toledo in 1960 for New York City, where he worked as a singer and tried acting and playwrighting as well. He then returned to Toledo to finish his bachelor's degree in 1964 before returning to New York to complete a decade-long period of training in a variety of art forms. Along the way, stopovers included a Writer's Conference at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the Antioch Writer's Workshop, the Boulder Colorado Writer's Conference, several summers at the BreadloafWriter's Conference at the School of Middlebury College in Vermont, and many additional courses and workshops in music, poetry, and theater. In the early 1960s his performances in coffeehouses, singing engagements in church choirs and as a soloist, and his job with World Publishing Company prepared him for the multiple voices he would develop as an artist. Martin sang in church and on the stage, acted and wrote for the theater, and experimented with a variety of poetic forms. It was becoming his habit in the earliest apprentice days in both writing and performance to set very different and even conflicting voices alongside each other in counterpoint patterns. The result of these juxtapositions and new combinations was a series of musical-theatrical-poetic hybrids in the development of his performance skills and the composition of his poems. By the end of the decade he had invented a new form of contrapuntal poetry and published his first collection of poems, New York the NineMillion and OtherPoems (1969). The years 1959 and 1960 were "important because of the places I went and the people I met," Martin begins his fifteen-page, single-paragraph retrospective of the times.' At the Antioch Writer's Conference in 1959, he • 21·

met W. D. Snodgrass and Anne Sexton and worked with Judson Jerome for the first time in what would become a long and rich interaction. In July 1960 he spent three weeks in Boulder, where Karl Shapiro gave him "new tips on imagery." In August he took the bus from Colorado to Vermont where he began his first residency at the Breadloaf Writer's Conference. Rooming with "the brilliant science fiction writer Samuel R. Delaney," Martin had a working scholarship: "I waited tables three times a day for classes, room and board and a critical assessment by John Frederick Nims" (1). At the conclusion of the summer 1960 Breadloaf Conference, a fellow student, John Medelman, gave him a ride to New York City: "I had $5.00, a paid up room at the 34th Street YMCA for a week, and a world of confidence." On his third day in town and down to $3.00, he found a job with World Publishing on 57th Street, where he worked as a mail clerk and cataloger of returned manuscripts. The job enabled him to meet many famous writers and to learn how editors and publishing house referees worked and thought. At the time he also sang in many churches in the city, performed his poems, and wrote poems and plays. In such diverse activities, the interconnectedness of Martin's various art forms was already apparent. In a variety of venues, his skills as a musical and dramatic performer began to shape the multiple voices of his poems, and this multivocal quality can be seen most clearly in the contrapuntal poems beginning in the early sixties. When he had saved enough money for a security deposit and the first month's rent, he began reading the New York Times and the Village Voice and he soon became a part of the poetry scene in the city's coffeehouses. What might be seen as the jumpstart of Martin's career is his association with the east-side coffeehouse Les Deux Megots, where the up-andcomers and soon-to-be-famous gathered to share their poetry. "Most writers and lovers of poetry as well as the curious ultimately found their way to this establishment and I was no different," Martin writes. He had heard of how "fearsome" the Beat Poets were and how they frowned upon the kind of "academic forms of poetry" he would have to offer. He was so terrified that he made up a pseudonym from names belonging to his father and grandfather. For his debut he would be "David Dave." He could tryout some poems and still cover his tracks: "Just in case everyone decided to laugh me out of the place, I could leave behind me in the rubble the factious character and resume my own personality" (2). After being fearful for weeks in advance, Martin was not at all prepared for the favorable reception he received. "The audience applauded me and after I had sat down along came a note inviting me to join the group of poets who met on other nights of the week to discuss each other's work. I had been invited; I was surprised, I was 22

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

floored." The reticence subsided and a quiet confidence began; he discarded the pseudonym and joined the group as Herbert Woodward Martin. Performing in Les Deux Megots gave Martin confidence and enabled him to expand his own "map of New York places which I frequented." For some time he had traveled only from 34th Street to 57th Street and back; at last he had saved enough money to live in New Jersey. But the city kept pulling him back, and he moved to an apartment at 34 West 59th Street. There he had one and a half rooms for $90 a month with plenty of space to write. His return to Les Deux Megots was again filled with "foreboding" that soon changed to relaxation and confidence as he listened to others read. Martin singles out some early favorites such as Taylor Mead and Ed Sanders, Marguerite Harris, Howard Ant, Carol Berge, and Diane Wakoski. The open and friendly atmosphere amazed him and encouraged him to push toward the multiple directions in which his work had already been heading. In that vibrant atmosphere, he recalls, "We were always waiting for that new unexpected voice to arrive on the scene to shake us all up, to dare us to perceive syntax in a different way, to force us to juxtapose words differently and to hear the music of our language in ways we had not anticipated. I have never experienced anything like that since" (3-4). The poets at Les Deux Megots were impressive and helpful to Martin at the time, and many became lifelong colleagues and friends. He singles out several for praise: Mary Mayo, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, and "the effervescent Ree Dragonette," who wrote "those hard symbolic poems which were always intensely sexual and poems which daringly explored jazz." Raymond Patterson, Lorenzo Thomas, Ishmael Reed, Jim Boyd, Bob Nicholas, and Paul Blackburn were regulars as was "that consummate musician" Jackson MacLow who uttered "textures and layers of sounds" almost like stutters: "It was a shock at first. But if you listened carefully there were pleasures to be heard." Pleasure was central in these readings and in the critiques Martin received and the "bonds and liaisons" which "were made for life." He had traveling buddies (Jack Marshall and Kathleen Fraser), and on one of those trips a very large group of the poets went to Lafayette College, in Easton, Pennsylvania, on a milestone journey-his first reading on the road: "We all had five minutes to read and I think we all earned $50.00 a piece. I purchased a battery operated record player with my honorarium" (5). An accomplished group of writers frequented Les Deux Megots. Allen Katzman, Diane Wakoski, Ishmael Reed, and several others published with Doubleday, Bob Nicholas with New Directions. Gary Youree and Carol Berge went on to publish novels. Calvin Hernton's Sex and Racism in America is still a "significant document about the sexual makeup of the fabric of the Contrapuntal Imagination

23

United States" (6). And then of course there was Bob Dylan, who Martin thought had an awful voice. He recalls being mesmerized when Dylan "took up his guitar and began singing his poems." Dylan was, of course, very successful at the Third Side, though one of Martin's friends, Ree Dragonette, got them thrown out for calling the coffeehouse "the third side of death." Characteristically, Martin moved back and forth among the groups, "careful not to declare allegiances or burn bridges." While he worried later that he may have been "too careful," this ability to cross over disciplinary and aesthetic boundaries is evident throughout Martin's career. He also listened to good advice. "There is no reason to put other people's names on sign boards," his mother always said (6). In a later retrospect assessing the important influences on him at this time, Martin worried about leaving someone out. In fact the roster of Les Deux Megots Writers for 1960-1965 does list many others he could have mentioned: Ted Berrigan, Gregory Corso, Diane DiPrima, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Joans, LeRoi Jones, Toby Olson, A. B. Spellman, among them. Martin learned from the critiques he received and the opportunities to experiment. To this day Martin plays with words and tries to get his students to have that same kind of fun-a creative experiment that was energized by a most unusual Les Deux Megots invention called the Experimental Poetry Machine. In some ways a forerunner of refrigerator magnet poetry, the machine fed words through a kind of movie projector, and as the words were projected on a screen or the wall, people would create poems on the spot. The machine worked by a throw of the dice that would decide how many words appeared. The result was a kind of chart poem. The Experimental Poetry Machine was made of a long strip of wood with film wrapped around allowing the words to roll out or move at will. The idea was to match words with photographs in a kind of rhythmic dance. Martin liked the innovativeness of the machine in spite of some people's objections that the process did not create poetry. Most of all, Martin was attracted to the playfulness of the process, the way people became engaged in a joyful process. To this day the Experimental Poetry Machine influences his performances where he regularly will ask an audience to write random words on paper and place them in a hat. He then picks the words from the hat and composes a poem on the spot. In the process he illustrates the playfulness, flexibility, and joy of language, and he invites us all to loosen up and listen to the poetry waiting to come from our lips. He has even experimented with a collection of refrigerator-type magnet poems called MagneticPoems. "Never rob / the wind," says one; "Go on at some / shadow chant / sing behind / some easy / music love / together," urges another. "Tell lazy luscious day / 24

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

like drive top chain. To lie and boil peach," we hear. One more: "bed her for smell / forest worship / lather spray / watch bitter dream / produce / repulsive / recall" (unpublished manuscript in HWMP). Perhaps the most dramatic innovation in Martin's poems developed at this early point in his career was his invention of the contrapuntal poem. Drawing upon his training and experience singing the counterpoint of J. S. Bach, he juxtaposed a second voice or melodic tone above or below or alongside an existing line in order to create both contrast and harmonious interaction. He drew his contrasting parallels from the dialogue of multiple speakers and from various art forms, from paintings, music, theater, opera, and the African American oral tradition. The result is both striking contrast and a new fusion of oppositions that works very much like a dialectical collision. He felt that if Bach could achieve such contrasting and harmonious effects musically, poets should certainly be able to achieve similar results. He succeeded for some of the same reasons Bach did, and he pushed the range of counterpoint into increasingly complex poetic forms. Because Bach knew a variety of art forms from many cultures, he was able to construct unusual mixes of styles and media. Martin was at this point an avid reader across many borders of literature, a performing musician and stage actor, and a writer eager to combine elements from his wide range of interests. He started originally with contrapuntal poems with two speakers set up in two columns of juxtaposed narration. Here are the first few lines of "Contrapuntal Pieces for Central Park West NO.4" from New York the NineMillion and OtherPoems: Pausing in the bend of a corner If the fiction must be told To windowshop has himself come and gone This is the way it ought to read There is a man walking Negro He is sitting on wood and stone. (19) Interestingly, this poem can be read several ways: speaker one straight down the left, speaker two straight down the right, or alternately with each speaker adding a comment in response to or in unison with the other. In his performances of these poems Martin dramatizes both vocal shifts and the possibilities of collision and combination, and always he plays with the as yet untried potential. He soon found the range and effects of the new forms to be very large. "Contrapuntal NO.7," for example, can be read forward and backward and around like a kaleidoscopic wheel: Contrapuntal Imagination

25

And do you wonder why in those last two months We came to touch so close I found an allowance of courage fearing neither kiss nor embrace to drive my image straight hungering between two worlds? (25) This poem makes sense read in any and all directions. Perhaps as in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake it is possible for readers to begin or stop reading at any point in the poem. Counterpoint styles, themes, and poetic voice reach far beyond contrapuntal poems to become a hallmark of Martin's artistry throughout his career. Three decades later-in February 1995-Mark Bernstein attributed much of Martin's success performing Dunbar to his creation in his own poems of "separate musical lines playing against each other to create an effect neither could achieve alone" (26). Martin's experiments in the early sixties in New York sparked his abiding attraction to counterpoint, and again Les Deux Megots afforded him opportunities to tryout new approaches. He remembers hearing a very wide "variety of poems in that coffeehouse, and some of them were dreadful, and some of those were mine" ("Aria" 8). He never thought his trip there was a waste, however, and he knew he had to be "willing to gamble" on certain reading and workshop nights. The gambles, the experiments, the playfulness provided an opportunity to think through his views on what art is supposed to be, about how poetry should be political, and about how literature "should make us think, react, reverberate" (10). Martin had fun at Les Deux Megots. He brought friends to the readings, his mother traveled from Toledo to hear him read, and he was pleased that many people from around the city came to hear his work. On one evening the headliners were Martin and Jim Boyd: "I remember sending out press releases on my own about my reading the most perfect poem in the language. It consisted of one minute of silence" (11). Such antics were a part of the freedom, the experimentation that allowed for new combinations, and to see what worked and what did not. "Newsday did send someone to review the reading," he recalls, "and we came off with our self-respect and our beings still intact" (11). Martin still appreciates how the Les Deux Megots poets "picked up techniques from each other." In the process of trying everything and anything, they were becoming original thinkers, "looking for ways to 'make it new, boys' as Ezra Pound advised." That fun and freedom 26

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

to experiment-as much as any other factors-contributed to the success of Martin's counterpoint. "When I think back there were many influences which I appreciated and they came from a variety of other disciplines: blues, classical music, dance, drama and art" (12). He saw the contrapuntal poem not only as an oratorio style but also "as much eastern in influence as it was western when you think of the differing cultures of the world and the way in which they employ their written languages" (12). The time he worked at World Publishing and performed at Les Deux Megots enabled Martin to control his artistry by what he calls letting it go: "I have always felt myself on the verge of being able to control moments and instances if I would only let go" (13). Part of the exhilaration, he felt, was working in "three disciplines" (or more) and learning how to make each artistic expression inform the others. The range of steady accomplishments in those early years in New York did become part of his poems in many ways for years to come. In 1961 he was studying voice and sight-reading at Hunter College as well as taking courses in copyediting and proofreading to advance his work in publishing. He worked as well with Umbra, a group of black writers from various parts of the country, "all gifted and talented in a variety of ways," from whom, he recalls, "I learned to trust my black voice or vision, though I am not sure I was ever uncomfortable with myself as a black" (11). He was also singing regularly at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New York, and he wrote to Pastor and Mrs. Yoder back in Toledo on February 27,1961,that he was also "trying to write on the side" (HWMP). In that letter he noted two poems that were coming out the next month in PoetryDial in South Bend, Indiana. He also managed to do poetry readings-announced in one press release as "the only New York appearance this season of the young American poet Herbert Woodward Martin at the Paraclete Book Center, 146 East 74th Street, on August 27,1963, at 8:30 P.M." The program was to include "the first American performance of his four contrapuntal poems for double voice and the first performance of a work in progress entitled 'I Dream You, Harlem" (HWMP). His credits included the earlier workshops and conferences as well as a drama fellowship awarded him to study with the American playwright Edward Albee. The notice announced that Martin's play A Dialogue would premiere in a fall production by the Hardware Poets Theater in New York and that he would tour Indiana in the fall "both as a lecturer in poetry and a song recitalist" (HWMP). Drama has been a crucial part of Martin's artistry throughout his career. His first performances were on Birmingham, Alabama, playgrounds where he and his friends enacted religious services for deceased birds. In school Contrapuntal Imagination

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he performed in skits and plays and sang in choruses and solo. He has also performed many lead roles in a variety of plays from Shakespeare to Broadway musicals. He has played both the Duke and Puck in different productions of A MidsummerNight'sDream, the first narrator in Under Milkwood, the policeman in A GoodWoman of Setzuan, Mr. Alfred in A Viewfrom the Bridge, Socrates in The Clouds, Boaz in a Reader's Theater performance of Kurt Vonnegut's TheSirens of Titan, the Aboriginal in My Country Is Good, and roles in a variety of musicals including Once Upon a Mattress, Pippin, Celebration, and TheRoar of the Greasepaint, TheSmellof the Crowd. He has performed as well with several major symphonies, the narrator in Aaron Copeland's A LincolnPortrait, in William Walton's and Edith Sitwell's Facade, and the Paul Laurence Dunbar poems for William Grant Still' sAfricanAmericanSymphony. He has written several plays and opera librettos (for more on the operas, see chapter 9). Although he had started writing a play before leaving Toledo in 1959,it was during the New York years that he made his greatest efforts to be a playwright. In the summer of 1961 he studied playwrighting with Edward Albee at Wagner College. In all, Martin wrote four plays. Adam Self is a metaphysical exploration of several social issues at the time. He revised the play several times under the new title Nathan. Neither version fared welL A Dialogue is a one-act play that ran for three months at the Hardware Poets Theater in New York in 1963. He wrote Exits and Entrances for a workshop with Edward Albee. He notes himself that the play"did not fare well," though it was thought that the voice of the mother"did ring true." Perhaps, he speculates, "there is a monologue here somewhere" (HWMP). He revised the play later under the title The KingDid Not Applaud-a satire that bears some resemblance to Douglas Turner Ward's Day ofAbsence. Finally, another oneact, Three Garbage Cans, with debts to the Absurdists, was produced in Grand Rapids in 1969. Each of these plays deserves examination here for its own merit and for its contribution to an understanding of how Martin absorbed elements of drama into his later poems. Like the contrapuntal poem form that he invented in the 1960s, the rhythms of the dialogue in his plays became central in the counterpoint structures and dialectical visions of his later work. In these years as a playwright he developed an ear for a multiplicity of voices that bring counterpoint patterns to his narrative and lyric poetry of the next three decades. Some of the Les Deux Megots poets were also playwrights, and Martin joined them for workshops and experimental stagings during a vibrant time for theater in New York City. Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisinin the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959,LeRoi Jones's Dutchman followed in 1961, and Adrienne

28

Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry

Kennedy's FunnyHouse of a Negro in 1962. Edward Albee's one-act plays The Sandbox, ZooStory, and TheDeathofBessie Smith created a sensation, and Who's Afraidof Virginia Woolf?established his reputation permanently in 1963. Martin worked with Albee in classes and workshops where his first play Exitsand Entrances was met with little enthusiasm. One piece of advice Albee provided had a critical effect not only on Martin's rewrites of plays but on his performance of literature-both his own and others-over the next few decades. In a letter to Martin of August 15, 1961, Albee wrote: "Remember to both hear and see your play while you are writing it, and become deeply involved with your material" (HWMP). In making the audience an integral part of the literature through a dialogical interaction, he took Albee's advice to heart. Martin revised Exitsand Entrances after watching a performance of Verdi' s opera II Trovatore in Copenhagen. The king and queen were in attendance at that performance, and although the real king "did applaud when the opera was completed," Martin renamed his play The King Did Not Applaud (HWMP). The backdrop of royalty in attendance is prominent in the new staging, where a sixty-five-to-seventy-year-old Caucasian named Sam sits at stage left on a "plush, throne-like chair with a crown and all the other accoutrements of royalty" while at stage right sits a Negro named Tom who is "the exact opposite of Sam in every respect." They are observers and commentators on the action of the play, and they engage in considerable verbal battling with each other as well. The action, over which they preside and comment, involves Julian and Allison Smith, a well-to-do Caucasian couple in their midforties who resemble a basset hound and a Cheshire cat, respectively. Their maid, a thirty-year-old Negro who "becomes a fox" is "the personification of sexuality." Further choreographing of action involves "youths, murderers, and dancers" who "establish their character through that animal they most identify with." The action of TheKingDid Not Applaud is a satire on parlor drama with a backdrop of absurdist and surrealistic countercommentary. The" extremely well to do" Mr. and Mrs. Jones-Smith smoke and "knit rhythmically" throughout as they engage in increasingly hostile arguments. When she is "brave enough" Allison "gives an order to the maid." Sam and Tom sit on their thrones and sing contrapuntally the white spiritual "You've Got to Cross That Lonesome Valley" and the Negro spiritual "I Want Jesus to Walk with Me." Sam announces that Julian is no doubt one of those "benevolent" white men who "well acquainted with a Negro, may, I believe, under some circumstances keep him in his family as a servant, on no other motives than the Negro's good." Mabel Mae is, however, a very opinionated and

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assertive maid whom Allison would like to fire, if she had the guts to do so. At the same time, Julian reaches the conclusion that the Negroes who had once known their place have become"demanding these days. Why I remember when they were the most content souls." After Mabel Mae tells the JonesSmiths that she has participated in many demonstrations and should be resting, she describes herself nonetheless as "dutiful and steadfast" and bursts into a stanza of "been in the storm so long." Debates follow with Julian telling Mabel to "go now" because "Mr. Jones-Smith and I were simply engaging in a private conversation." Mabel slips into a southern accent and replies with "I know that suh! But now'n then I think the two uvyou could do with sum fresh opinion." Sam then speaks from his throne that "the spirit of the masters is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust ... the way I hope preparing ... for total emancipation with the consent of the masters, rather than their extirpation." Mabel's insights and her confidence zing the Jones-Smiths repeatedly, and the couple bickers increasingly while Sam and Tom involve the audience in the issues raised: "Do those proceedings beget hard thoughts?" Tom asks, and Sam follows with, "Do hard thoughts, when ripe, become malice?" When Julian says he can have both cream and lemon in his tea because "we can afford it," Allison replies that they would curdle, and Mabel retorts "which just goes to show you that there are certain things you just can't mix together for love or money." The debates and innuendoes continue for some time, culminating in Allison's stereotypical responses to Mabel about "what do you expect us to do about" all kinds of problems and "why, you're just like one of the family." Mabel shoots back, "Like the ones you never mention, I suppose"-and she asks, "What do you know about grabbing a black hand and taking it to school?" Mabel tells the couple that she does not hate them but feels "mighty sorry" for them. "What a strange outburst," Allison declares-to which Julian adds, "And so unexpected from our Mabel." They debate about whether they ought to let the maid go. ("After all she doesn't appear to be too happy here. Yet, despite her illness she is a good girL") When Allison exits to get more hot water, a surrealistic scene follows with spotlights on Julian and Mabel having sex to a mix of Handel's "Messiah" and songs by Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Percy Sledge as well as "Know That My Redeemer Liveth" sung by Adela Addison accompanied by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The scene is bathed in blue light and the "end frame should be Julian in the arms of Mabel, Pieta style." Allison returns suspecting she had heard footsteps near the house, and they debate "calling the police on Mabel or somebody." ("It would make us members of the rights movement, and if nothing more we could at least look like supporters of 30

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

their cause.") As they begin to feel they will soon be under siege, Julian assures Allison that there is "nothing to worry about" and "besides, we can always buy our way out." A large group of Negroes slips into the house ("You pray for time. I'll get the money") and stands there "expressionless" ("You people just make yourself at home," Julian invites). Soon Julian and Allison are both killed and there is "no sound but that of the incessant bell that Allison rang once too often." After a blackout, the light comes up on a black man and black woman who have taken the place of the Jones-Smiths. As the curtain falls, the woman is heard to say "knit one, purl one ...." The characters, plot, and symbolic settings of The King Did Not Applaud hold up well alongside many successful plays of the time. In workshops, the character of Allison Jones-Smith was singled out as having considerable potential. Possibly the play did not sell because there was too much machinery, or perhaps it was a one-act play needing more development. Then, too, perhaps the political themes were heavy-handed or the absurdist elements not yet explored sufficiently. But the play is a laboratory of counterpoint elements with Julian and Allison playing against each other, Sam and Tom adding choruslike pronouncements structured as counterpoint, and the realistic domestic scenes juxtaposed against multimedia explosions as if intruding from another genre. Perhaps the play would be more effective as an Alban Berg-type impressionistic opera with melody and dissonance in contrapuntal frames signaling the impending disruption of the status quo. Whatever the verdict on the play overall, there are hints everywhere of Martin's early sense of dialogical meshing of the disparate. In the most quiet moments, there is always an intruding presence of Other. Flowing plot stops short in ironies as colliding rhythms throughout foreshadow the destructive-reconstructive conclusion. Alongside his contrapuntal poems of the time, The King Did Not Applaud provides the clearest glimpse of the multimedia packages Martin would create later in poetry and opera. Martin's other three one-acts represent varying successes. Adam Self did not fare well. Adam Self is a Negro poet, a senior in college from a well-to-do home. Anne Dearing is a Caucasian music student in college. Gabriel Paul, a homosexual writer who has lived with Adam, provides the "stress of a triangle." Other characters include Adam's parents, Eva and David, and Anne's parents, Emma and Henry. Martin's stage notes indicate that much of the play is about "the three selves" that are primary "influences in the mind of Adam." Reviews of the play in workshops were not strong. One participant commented: "Adam Self is not a play" but a "thinly disguised essay" (HWMP). He found the piece too intellectualized, too talky, and too predictable. Contrapuntal Imagination

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At the end of the decade, ThreeGarbage Cans was more successful. Produced in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Aquinas College (1969), where Martin was poet-in-residence, the play recalls Beckett and other absurdist techniques stemming no doubt from Martin's work with Edward Albee some years earlier. A young girl and young boy are in dialogue about what it would be like to dance on the moon (Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in July 1969), whether they like each other, and what it will be like to die ("I mean the sensation, stupid, I mean the sensation," HWMP). The Girl is the protagonist asking the Boy if he has the nerve to shoot her, asserting that when she dies she wants "both the body and the soul to know what death is. I want the agony to show." At that point at last she will have "surrendered to a higher force." The Boy announces that he can do it ("I got all the nerve it takes") but that he does not want to "commit murder just because you got some gloriously foolish idea about dying." She finally does persuade him that she needs his help, they kiss, and he kills her. In a blackout the audience hears the Girl's voice in the distance repeating her last line, "I heard someone say, 'Come back.'" Scenery is sparse; action and dialogue are fast in this short one-act that captures the grimness and senselessness of the close of a decade dominated by unexplainable assassinations and conflicts. By far Martin's most successfully staged play, A Dialogue, ran for three months in 1963 in New York at the Hardware Poets Theater. The action involves a confrontation between two characters in the rain at 59th Street and Columbus Avenue in New York City. A thirty-five-year-old "angry and primarily overly ambitious" white policeman and a twenty-five- or twenty-sixyear-old, casually dressed American Negro taunt each other over the weather, their own ambitions, and the contents of a box. The Policeman regularly proclaims that he is the Law: "I want all of you people to know you're my constant worry, and that's day in, day out, night in, night out" (HWMP). The young Negro, who is called the Pedestrian, sarcastically responds, "You know it's good to know someone has your interests at heart." The Pedestrian worries about "Puerto Ricans moving in on every side" and about being "undermined by Communists." The Policeman gets carried away with his proclamations about how he is out on the beat everyday "watching, loving, protecting ... because I love the people on this beat." We learn that the Pedestrian's name is Mr. George Washington ("your old lady sure must have been patriotic") and that the officer's 11,335 friends call him Abe. There ensues a debate about the contents of what Mr. Washington carries in a mysterious box. He says that it contains laundry, but he also tells Abe it is a bomb ("Oh, that, I was just kidding"). In a case ofwhat is now called racial profiling, Abe decides, "I'm running you in .... I'll think of something by the time we 32

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

get to the station." The Policeman discovers that the Pedestrian really is carrying laundry ("What are you some kind of wet clothes inspector? "). The dialogue of bantering comes to an end when George tells Abe, "For the rest of your life you can look forward to being nothing more than a flunky of a foot cop. But that's the way the breaks fall." The Policeman promptly kills George and files the following radio report: "Area problem ... suspicious characters ... two Negroes. One got away ... the other one got shot trying to get away. Send morgue wagon." He then looks down at the dead body and proclaims as the curtain falls, "I'm going to sit behind that desk yet, colored boy, I'LL SIT BEHIND THAT DESK, YET." A Dialogue shows a very harsh side of the gentle warrior playwright writing on racial profiling almost forty years ago. While there is plenty of rancor in A Dialogue, there is also contrapuntal meshing but little sense that the dialectical opposites portrayed here can come to any good. There is no way out of the social and political problems identified, and as in TheKingDid Not Applaud and Three Garbage Cans, death seems all along to be the only expected or possible resolution. In spite of his modest success as a playwright in New York City and elsewhere, the importance of Martin's writing for the stage can be seen primarily in his creation of authentic voices in poetry and in his ability to combine successfully so many art forms in his creations of new genres. From stage dialogue and his own experimentations with contrapuntal poems he developed a lifelong commitment to capturing multiple points of view in his works. The confrontational exchanges of his politically charged and absurdist dramas helped shape his later dramatic poems including the collagelike structures of historical narratives such as The Log of the VigiIante. Writing for the stage also combined with his musical training and his singing in the black church to prepare him to perform and to write in the oral artistry of everyday black speech. Martin credits the voice of the black preacher and the music of the black church with helping him to hear natural speech patterns. Early in his career Martin developed the ability to listen and to hear precisely the speech patterns that he reproduced on stage and in the voices of his poems. The performances at Les Deux Megots were valuable for tuning the ear: "I either heard something which inspired me or told me to beware of certain pitfalls. A moving sigh from the audience told you the poem was alive. A critical eye told you when one image was not up to the rest of the poem. That kind of criticism is worth more than platinum" ("Aria" 8). At this point Martin's musical training, his Les Deux Megots readings, and the theater workshops came together to build confidence and set direction. He developed a collaborative spirit, sought out criticism, and revised extensively (sometimes "too much," he would often worry). Contrapuntal Imagination

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All of this, he says, "enhanced my self confidence and made me think that having a career was possible" (8). As much as he loved theater and would remain committed to acting, Martin was beginning to choose a different direction for his own writing. After A Dialogue concluded its run at the Hardware Poets Theater, director Jerry Bledsoe suggested that he do less revising and instead "go home and write more." Martin was encouraged: "I think my ear for dialogue was getting better and might have become superior if I had done so [followed Bledsoe's advice] .... But I have long believed that I was called to be a poet and I have worked to make my work accessible to whatever audience I could muster." With that sense of wanting to expand the audience for poetry, he also confessed desire for fame ("I ... have always had a deep craving for fame if not immortality. I think I have diligently worked toward that end. Is this too outrageous a characteristic to reveal?" 7) But Martin again felt a longing to finish school. In 1963 he applied for admission to Columbia University and was accepted, though complicated transfer credit arrangements would require two years to complete his degree there as opposed to the one remaining year at the University of Toledo. A letter sent back home the previous year describes a longing that would soon send him back to the University of Toledo to complete his degree. Writing to University of Toledo professor and mentor Sarah Bissell on April 3, 1962, Martin notes that he had been singing "an oratorio a month" in the church choir and that he would be making "what I like to think of as my choral debut a month from today at Carnegie Hall.'? The performance would be Mozart's Requiem with the Dessoff Choir. He tells his former mentor Bissell that he has been at work again on a play that he started before leaving Toledo and that he has "begun again" five or six times. Again what seems crucial to Martin is the ability to hear his plays in performance. A group of friends will give his playa private reading, he tells her: "This is important for the playwright, because one is able to tell more readily what works and what doesn't work when we see and hear the action outside of our imaginations." He also tells Miss Bissell that he has"succumbed to reading poetry in the Village" and that he has developed "a small following" that both embarrasses and pleases him: "I hardly know what to think of my newfound audience. I think I feel very much like Julius Caesar must have felt when he was offered the Laurel crown. Of course he had done so much to deserve the crown; I have not." But in this report back to the home front, he says he is "happy that some of the things I am doing these days seem to make sense." He talks about four poems to be published in a periodical called Seventh Street, and that the responses he is getting from friends and at World 34

Herbert WoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

Publishing have been making him"get more and more critical every day." All in all, he assures Miss Bissell that"criticism is a kindness I hardly know what I would do without." Yet he tells his former professor that he has "begun to miss the University" and that he has contemplated returning. His mother's advice is that he has devoted enough of his life to the classroom, and he wonders if she may be right: "She says some people never get as much education as I have received. And she is right again." But a resolve pushes through here that will predict the course of the next several decades: "Yet I keep thinking that with only a little more perseverance I might have my degree (that most elusive of all things in my life) and be considered something of a professional." Over the next year, this resolve would grow and lead Martin not only back to Toledo but on a track to completing numerous additional degrees and receiving honors which at this point he could not have envisioned. Martin weighed all his options and returned to the University of Toledo in the fall of 1963. He remembers it as a very difficult year in which he almost didn't make it-not because he was back in the classroom, but because he missed the excitement and energy of New York City. He did well academically, graduated in the spring of 1964, and landed a fellowship for the next fall to begin graduate study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. But the lure of New York City was strong, and upon graduation he hitched a ride back to New York immediately-driving nonstop with a friend who had neither license nor insurance. He was a wreck when they arrived, he recalls, but New York once again revived his spirits and offered opportunities. He was hired by Allied Advertising Incorporated, and the life of the New York writer was back in swing if only for the summer this time. In the fall he moved to Buffalo for a three-year period that would be productive but also one of the most trying times in his life. SUNY Buffalo afforded the opportunity to study with some legendary writers and teachers including Leslie Fiedler, Dorothy Van Ghent, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and John Barth. He also learned a great deal from native Toledoan George Lee and resident poets John Logan, Irvin Feldman, and Fred Will. Fellow students and poets included John Weiners, Stephen Roderfer, Shreela Ray, Charles Martin, and Charles Molesworth. Much of his own poetry at this point was lyrical. He was working on images and read a great deal of Ezra Pound. Rosey Poole's Beyondthe Blues had introduced Martin to the work of Robert Hayden and reacquainted him with the African American oral poets, Harlem Renaissance writers, and, of course, the blues. The years in Buffalo again expanded Martin's range of interests. With wry understatement, he recalls his experiences there as more than the usual "a mixture of ups and downs." During his first two years, course work was Contrapuntal Imagination

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"horrendous," and he remembers that he "struggled with every demon who saw fit to confront me" ("Fire" 354). Mostly, he recalls, he won the battles "with a certain amount of dignity." It was a time to tough it out without the exhilaration of New York City or the support systems of Breadloaf or Toledo. He remembers that Gary Brodsky "struggled as much as I did," fearing C's around every bend. "Meat hooks, we called them, that would fly us into the wilds of the country, without a degree if we were not careful" (354). The experiences in Buffalo nearly drove Martin out of academic life, but in some unexplainable way the challenges put him tenaciously on a course that would lead once again to Breadloaf and then to the doctoral program at Carnegie-Mellon. "In those days, I confess, a 9 to 5 job without papers to grade or preparations was very inviting." Brodsky and Martin survived "because tradition (Jew and Black) demanded it of all of us" (354). In a letter to Brodsky more than thirty years later, (July 7, 1998) he writes: "I rejoice that I was able to walk away from that town with my mind intact, my self respect in my hands, and some ability to teach and write" (HWMP). He confides to Brodsky: "Little did I know what I was doing when I rejoiced at the fellowship they gave me" in that paradoxical place of "talent and destruction." He recalls that the talent was often very good ("A. S. Cook did gather about him some brilliant minds"). He pays tribute to the astounding people of the music department and the gifted individuals who went about their business quietly like Charles Martin, who had published two books of brilliant poetry with Princeton and the "grad student who put us all to shame by publishing an article in PMLA before getting his Ph.D." Finally after the trials and tribulations of two years Martin relaxed in his third year "and said to hell with it, I should have some fun." Martin did walk away from Buffalo-but not to head for the hills or opt for the nine-to-five job. Instead, he accepted his first full-time teaching position at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He spent three years there as a poet-in-residence-teaching, writing, and acting in plays professionally. At the same time he returned to the Breadloaf Writer's Conference at Middlebury College (during several summers before and while he taught at Aquinas College), where he was a scholarship writer who worked with younger student writers just starting out. He credits John Ciardi, conference director, for understanding "better than anyone else my needs to be confirmed as a writer" ("Fire" 349). His roommate this time was the poet Alvin Aubert, later founder and editor of Obsidian, in which Martin published the first version of TheLogof the Vigilante in 1976. His critic that summer was Miller Williams (the poet who read at President Clinton's second inauguration). Williams became a mentor and supporter for years to come: "He is the only

36

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

Martin perform s in th e musical Celebration in Grand Rapids, Michigan , spring 1970. Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Martin.

poet who gave me permission to disa gre e. Th at is an excellent privilege. It allows you to state your intention in a non-defensive way and continue to learn " (349). This was very high praise coming at a pivotal time w hen Martin was writing and acting, di sagreeing with a lot of people, and continuing to learn. It was Williams as well who gave him encouragement about his first book-New Yorkthe Nine Million and Other Poems, a collection of poems that captures the contrapuntal experiences of a turbulent decade. After his first summer at Breadloaf in 1960 Martin returned there for several summers-as did many of his colleagues-to what he calls "these delightful, pleasant groves" (journal entries and notes for commencement

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Larry Blovitts, art teacher; Martin ; and joseph McNam ara, English teacher, at Ma rtin 'sfi rst teachingjob at Aquinas College, 1967. Courtesy of Herbert Woodw ard Martin.

address , HWMP). In 1972, as president of the graduating class of the Breadloaf School of English, he deli vered the commencement address. He had four working titles for the speech: "The Many Loves of C. C. Tutwiler, III, or Paradise Lost," "Early Baroque in Ripton," "Lear Gone Mad," and "Adam in Arcadia." By the time he delivered the speech , he had been away from New York City for eight years and away from Buffalo for five years. He had been poet in residence at Aquinas College for three years and had completed one year as assistant professor and poet-in-residence at the University of Dayton. In that summer of 1972, he was immersed in plans for the 38

Herbert Woodward Martin and th e Af rican American Tradition in Poetry

Martin at La Grande Vitesse in GrandRapids, 1969. Courtesy ofHerbert WoodwardMartin.

Paul Laurence Dunbar Centennial Celebration to be held in Dayton that fall. His second book of poetry The Shit-Storm Poems was about to appear. While a great deal of significant but isolated events had occurred on many fronts throughout the Breadloaf years, the speech is a valuable retrospect as well as a roadmap of wher e he seemed to be headed. The address began with a few direct points of thanks, farewell , and love. He wanted to create a coronation atmosphere "because quite seriously we lack a kind of pageantry and ceremony in our lives." 3 He had intended to use "the royal we, to talk a little about the intense religious nature of Bach, Mozart's supreme intellect, Beethoven's Apollonian vision, Brahms walking gently through the universe, the simplicity of (and you will have to choose one the following) Negro, Black, Afro-American Spirituals, and of course the rise and use of the word 'Chile' to a, shall we say, vern acular if not scholarly usage. " Although his audience got the jokes and Martin quietly retreated ("But all these things shall have to await another time"), this whimsical outline does review the variety of directions in which his artistry had been evolving. The graduates stand on the shoulders of family, he notes, and while silence is sometimes enough for gratitude tacitly acknowledged, "we too often take the small amenities for granted, for genuine sentiment shames us." He reviews the activities in which he had been involved going back twelve years and summarizes "w hat we are called to do as each of us leaves the mag ic mountain to work agai n in the real world." He knows he is being corny but feels he is telling the truth : "We m ust see our st udents Contrapuntal Imagination

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Herbert Martin and Willie Ma e Martin at th e Breadloaf School graduation, August 1972. Courtesy of th e estate of Willie Ma e Martin.

as human beings and individuals always regarding them with the same attention that has been given here. Indeed, if we meet this challenge we may not only seize the time but possibly redeem it. " He recalls , "Somewhere I have written in a very bad poem that 'love is the most precious thing I know.' That seems to me to be the best line and probably the one that verges the most on sentimentality." Redeeming time through love is a central theme of his poems by this point in his career, and the sentimental love he quotes is also part of the dedication of his first book (to his mother): New Yorkthe Nine Million and Other Poems-a collection of New York experience poems, nurtured at Breadloaf and published in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "New York the Nine Million," the title poem and unifying narrative of the volume, chronicles one Sunday in the city-hour by hour through straightforward reporting and crisp imagery. In six stanzas totaling sixty-seven lines , the story begins at midnight with the prospect of sleeping in until noon.t Movement one: It is one of those buy-the-paper-on Saturday nights, and all is at rest if not peace: "Sex is not to be had / For free or purchase. / Go home like a defeat from war / Masturbate, / It is the only sedative left: / Take it .... " Movement two: At one o'clock at West 8th Street and 6th Avenue a man 40

Herbert Woodward Martin and th e African Ame rican Tradition in Poetry

paces where the curb "wears into the gutter." Like a slow-motion excerpt from cinema verite, a woman comes to get a match if the man can keep it dry long enough: "0 nail yourself to your sheets / 0 nail yourself face down / kiss into whatever breasts are there / It is the only sedative left:-Take it. ..." Movement three: At two o'clock the narrator heads home where, for his wife, he "will be the sedative; / Second her motion to love, and / Sleep to revival time." But on the long subway journey from 8th to west 125th, "every voice in the subway / Has its own train." He watches a man looking in a mirror playing "Mirror, mirror, what am I?" and again "It is the only sedative left:-Take it ...." Movement four: It's a Sunday morning of "sun splintered on pilgrims." The only sedative of the religion of Central Park is to relax and "the mind is not forced to cast a shadow." Movement five: In the afternoon while "About goodness, a final point must always be made," the narrator walks up from 65th to 125th watching "the buggied babies fighting the flies, while / their nannies gorge themselves on chocolates, and / thoughts of last night's love." While each movement so far has been a deliberate gliding into a variety of sedatives, here the rhythm and rhyme scheme are syncopated and jazzlike: "Brown nannies, white nannies / push me up, push me down / pray all the gray-haired people / who peek in / lose their frowns." Movement six: A man approaches the narrator for a cigarette to soothe his ache. "Sorry, I don't smoke," he replies but a quarter is "enough to make his knee go supple as prayer" and that "may have been his only sedative." And so the day ends and the week gets ready to begin again if not anew: "I left him in the nineties, thinking / a confusion of thoughts: / rain: / sundown:- / of pity and pain:- / that with Sunday's end the week has begun again." Following the rotation of the sun and edging along the clock, "New York the Nine Million" is a symphonic poem about the bittersweet experiences of those multitudes who crowd together in each other's space and never quite break through into each other's minds and hearts. There is a quest in the motion chronicled and the observations kept locked in the narrator's thoughts, but each attempt to break free is answered with sedation. A variety of sedatives are explored-from sex and drugs to relaxation and love and prayer. In the end we are left with a Waste-Land poem punctuated by forays into Langston Hughes's "Harlem." Everyone seems trapped in isolation in spite of the crowds, the glitter, the if-you-can-make-it-here vitality. This poem frames the rest of the collection of nine "Antigone" poems and seven contrapuntals. As prelude to the Antigone sequence, in "Oedipus to Antigone" Oedipus begs his daughter to help his hands and "sightless feet" avoid the traps of brick and stone, to teach them "newly how to feel" and to rest at last with Contrapuntal Imagination

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what counts after all else fades: "Guide me to some blind exile / where I might reason what structure emotion is when / flesh is bare and scarred; the crown has toppled the head; / where facade falls, and bone begins to flake" (3). Martin uses the Oedipus and Antigone stories (he had a cat in the early sixties in New York named Antigone). But he was more likely (throughout these years at Breadloaf) to be quoting Lear, who raises the same issues. In his Breadloaf graduation speech, he underscored: "As most of you know, I'm given to quoting Lear, where he says '0 sweet heaven, let me not be mad'" (HWMP). He then refers to the calls that came for Ghandi, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and Whitney Young-modern heroes whom we could ask "tell me how did you feel when you came out of the wilderness a leaning on the Lord?" The Antigone sequence in New York the NineMillion and OtherPoems explores that same"curious dilemma" that he emphasizes in his convocation address: the heroes lost their lives to "save the inner-self" (HWMP). Two poems in the Antigone set are "tavern pieces" set in the many colored lights where "too many faces are forcing themselves into a private reality" and where escape is again the remedy for the "lonely business of addressing truth" (New York 5). A tribute to the tavern waitress who moves "swiftly from table to table," "Antigone VIII" explores the world where "people order bottles of dreams" and the narrator wonders how she might yet "keep all their possibilities of visions that the hand cannot hold onto: "How do you walk in the 3 AM air? Is it fresh to you? / Do you have other arms to walk you in warmth?" (11). Several others in the sequence are love poems. "Antigone III" addresses a soprano playing Butterfly ("You could not conceive how much I loved you when you spoke to my ear / Nor can you know what a silence exists in my heart now" (6). "Antigone IV" is a song of bitter regrets: "There are certain conditions we cannot have, Ortega Y Gasset. This particular love never knew its dying" (7). In "Antigone V" the speaker recalls the "first warmth" he knew "beneath Shoko" and is left to accept his new relationship of isolation: "I go walking the street-blocks until I am too tired, / I fall irretrievably upon the single arm of my bed" (8). In "Antigone VI" the narrator meets a "young girl in a purple gown" passing out yellow roses in Central Park "as if they were answers" (9). He walks all day with that yellow rose and in the end is left with its thorns upon which flesh will bleed and "murder its odor." A few in the sequence offer hope, as in "Antigone VII" where the poet begins writing intoxicated ("because you have too often / teased me into other worlds and times"), moves through "walk quietly with me," and concludes with the resolve "We must start to peel off / the walls to find what is underneath" (10). The opening 42

Herbert WoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

and closing poems in the set come full circle. "Antigone I" asks how the world looks from the moon (another reference to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in July 1969) and if the moon can see the speaker "in my dreams / loving your tiny sinews" (4). Martin's use of syncopation and the beginnings of contrapuntal structure emerge in stanza two positioned flush right on the page: "Moon tighten sea. / River run through grass. / There is a pool of dust / On the desert tonight" (4). But the moon is false, and the winter love has incurred great losses: "Several Negroes, a number of whites, / One Siamese, silver point, beautiful, all, in a forest of grass" (4). In this volume about many different kinds of loss, "Antigone I" looks for the"certain clarity to understanding possessions lost" but settles for the memory of losing two loves in one year-and I "have not touched that music again" (4). Finally, "Antigone IX" returns to that music of love passing through one's lips, moving "out of my hands like air you cannot hold" (12). There is a clarity from this loss and a determination of sorts-that even though "I can never touch the reality of you" unless in imagination "fortified by stone," the narrator resolves "I would grasp the stone / if there is any" (12). The Antigone sequence thus comes to a close in the brittle grips of imagination. What began with Oedipus's cry to "reason what structure emotion is ... when facade falls and bone begins to flake" (3) moves through barroom visions of private realities, restless walking through an indifferent cityscape, and magical roses that draw blood from their sweet scent, to a series of lost loves and fading imaginative visions. This holding onto the stone echoes Martin's charge in the conclusion of the Breadloaf commencement speech to redeem a world of loss through love. "We have had enough sacrifices," he asserts. "Words are frail enough, even the substantial air will not support them. We must find a new way of installing humanity into them again, of touching the flesh, of feeling the pulse, of moving the mind toward love and justice" (HWMP). Whether he is thinking of the Antigone of Sophocles or his longlost New York City cat, he returns to Oedipus's request for a vision that might hold when all else is blind and bare, scarred, fallen, and flawed. Martin's new ways of writing and understanding are embodied in the seven contrapuntal poems that complete this collection. Each contrapuntal structure is a logical outgrowth of the juxtaposition, dialogues, and counterpoint rhythms that he had been adding to his poetry readings and creating in his plays. Consider the way these lines work in "A Fable of Two Thoughts": If lovers can love and feel no shame Ambivalence is the emotion between these lines. They can part and feel no duty Contrapuntal Imagination

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Where sunrise and twilight guard The soul-secret in its primeval. (16) These lines can be read straight through and then alternately as the first, third, and fifth lines followed by the second, fourth, and sixth lines and still make good sense. That is a special effect of sorts, but when counterpoint is working at its best the reader will feel the calling or mixing of multiple meanings from several speakers with juxtaposed lines. The effect is like that achieved by Bach's counterpointed melodies as structure and theme reinforce each other through contrast and simultaneity. A similar result is achieved in "Man Woman," which begins with a "round" and then goes contrapuntal: Now are we of a particular hope, prisoners. Swift, Fall leaves the stone-walk. We claw up essential ladders. We walk down an autumn. Despite what seems, and what is not legitimate Nuance is an interminable path. (18) Again the lines can be read with multiple voices and it is important to shade the tone for each distinct speaker. There is a flow, but the direction can go either way with equal clarity and precision or both ways with considerable ambiguity. Like the poetry machine from Les Deux Megots and Martin's later games picking words out of hats, the contrapuntal structure invites-even requires-readers to participate in the creation of variations on the poem as they experiment with the different patterns that are available. Try reading the opening of contrapuntal No.6 various ways: Standing here in what seems like a difficult moment We are destroyed by too rough a touch All in the mind runs the pleasure of love Never sensing the condition of our coming Orpheus sang in his death upon frigid water Such truth can puncture the heart. (24) Depending on how the reader moves the flow, the problems are more or less urgent and the resolutions satisfying or unraveling. "It is a difficult form of harmony / Listening only to the head sing," the poem continues. Or is it "It is a difficult form of harmony / Where intellect struggles to assess its 44

Herbert WoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

estate / In that special time called now"? Or is it "In that special time called now / We should have remained in exile"? (24). Interpretation of a contrapuntal poem depends, of course, on who gets to decide which way the lines move in and in what order. A commentator might best quote an entire poem and invite readers to create their own structures and speculate on the varying effects of the decisions they make. The best selection for that exercise would be contrapuntal NO.7, which can be read down or up both columns or around in a circle in both directions (quoted earlier in this chapter). Like counterpoint music, a contrapuntal poem would achieve multiple effects through repetition, interruption, and lines playing over each other. The performer and audience, or the reader sitting with a text, can themselves orchestrate variations of structure, emphasis, and theme. Martin uses contrapuntal techniques in standard narrative poems as well, as in "Contrapuntal Pieces for Central Park West NO.4," where the story told in stanza I ends with these lines: Beneath an extinguished street lamp He cripples his feet to the form of pavement, Affords himself a dream of warmth and brandy Knowing end is always caught in distances To calm the effect of waiting And beginnings lie vaguely on the tip of the tongue. (19) Theatrical, musical, and contradictory, the contrapuntal can be a highly self-conscious, almost self-reflexive technique which draws attention to the confusions and the contrary nature of our search for clarity. Consider how "A Smile, a Hand, a Heart, Love Begins This Way" uses counterpoint structure to argue for a certain attitude toward relationships, perspective, and the search for truth. The poem begins: You are on the right. Opposition.

I am on the left. Counterpoint.

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MORALS.

Their relationship grows as they interrupt or contradict one another, only to then anticipate each other's statements and thoughts. The distance is too far for hands BEST, THE HEART SPANS SPACE

Does it?

Does it? Contrapuntal Imagination

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The possibilities are many for reading the contrapuntal lines that Martin places within a conventional point-counterpoint dialogue. A resolution of sorts follows in this 1969 postmodernist love ballad: Speak individual, not for other men Where truth resides The ear positive to hear TRUTH, THEN, IS A STATE OF MIND.

Emotion is a word The eye is sure to see The tongue definite to speak (17)

Contrapuntal poems can move in several directions at once, and their effect depends on a well-tuned ear and a playfulness with language. From his earliest days in the Alabama backyards in the shadows of the four o'clock flowers, through his college courses, performances in plays, and in the New York coffeehouses and from singing in church choirs and oratorios, Martin learned to combine multiple art forms. His work is, as a result, a fiction of this varied experience, an innovative hybrid artistry. The increasingly contrapuntal imagination that he refined throughout the sixties would also prepare him to meet up once again with a poet who emerged from the oral tradition and who was himself an artist of considerable range: Paul Laurence Dunbar. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Martin should meet again with the poet who was said to be his look-alike back in elementary school. In the spring of 1970, while poet-in-residence at Aquinas College, he visited Dayton, Ohio, to read his own poems. It's a long story, and more than three decades have passed-but he is still in Dayton and his partnership with Dunbar has become perhaps the biggest influence on his life and career.

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·3·

Sight-Reading Dunbar The Reluctant Partnership of Two Dayton Laureates

For as long as Martin could remember, the life and works of Paul Laurence Dunbar hovered over his own life and works. When he was a young boy growing up in Birmingham, Martin's physical resemblance to Dunbar was often noted. In school, when he was asked to read Dunbar's poems, he grew annoyed with the comparisons. In a recent essay, "Reluctant Heir," Martin recalls how it was not easy to be a look-alike because he felt like a second that would be sold at bargain prices. He remembers that, as a child, he was uncomfortable about something he was too young to understand or do anything about. In short, being a Dunbar look-alike meant the young Martin would be expected to recite Dunbar even though he and his friends found it only burdensome. Further, his friends thought he could intervene with his cousin Paul to get the teachers to reduce the workload. The nuisance was persistent, but Martin kept his distance from Dunbar until he entered college. He recalls both reading Dunbar's poems in the "colored schools" in Birmingham and hearing them recited by his mother and other relatives. In high school, however, it was almost as if Dunbar and other African American poets had disappeared. Even though as a teenager he had a keen interest in writing and reading literature, Martin found that Dunbar was nowhere in his textbooks or classrooms until he arrived in college. Even there it took some looking and the encouragement of University of Toledo professors who told him about whole books by African American poets. Soon he read James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. At that point, too, he became reacquainted with Dunbaralthough he was still mindful of the earlier annoyances as well as the slight uneasiness felt in many literary circles about dialect poetry and the controversies linking Dunbar to a "plantation" school of writers.

The partnership between Martin and Dunbar was a long time in the making. While in New York, he had not given much thought to Dunbar-preferring instead to explore the Eliot-Pound school and the Beats. At Breadloaf he had come under many influences, from William Carlos Williams and the Black Mountain poets to the various mentor-teachers with whom he had studied. During much of that time he was singing in churches and chorale groups, while beginning his teaching career and trying to become a playwright. Either by simple omission or some kind of deep repression, there seemed to be no room for Dunbar. As Martin assembled the material for readings of his own poems and works by others, he incorporated an increasingly wide range of authors into his performances. Such works included beat literature, Harlem Renaissance poems, slave songs, and the spiritual-but seldom if ever the dreaded Dunbar. Even as late as February 1971, as noted in a letter to Singer Buchanan, coordinator of Black Student Programs at Purdue University, Martin's performance program included folk songs and spirituals, poems by Dudley Randall, Don L. Lee, Robert Hayden, Nikki Giovanni, and LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka)-but as yet no Dunbar (HWMP). At the same time, some sort of destiny was at work to bring the two poets together in Dayton-the city where Dunbar was born and where he wrote most of his poems. Martin left New York in 1967 for Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a teaching position at Aquinas College. From the city of Dunbar's birth, from the city where Dunbar operated an elevator and where he wrote so prolifically in so short a time, the University of Dayton called Martin and, in the fall of 1970, offered him a teaching position that has continued for more than thirty years: Professor of English, poet-in-residence, Paul Laurence Dunbar Poet Laureate of the City of Dayton, and poet-in-residence at the Dunbar Memorial House, among others. Over three decades he has received numerous awards for teaching and performance of poetry, prizes for literature, scholarship, and acting, and many grants and tributes both in Dayton and throughout the world. Perhaps fellow poet Len Roberts captures the essence of Martin's career at the University of Dayton most aptly in a letter of February 20,1992: "When I first met Professor Martin twenty-two years ago, I was studying for a master's degree at the University of Dayton. I was directionless, knowing only that I loved literature. It was Herbert Woodward Martin who showed me, through his love of, and dedication to, poetry, exactly what a vocation is-a calling, a dedication." Over the years Roberts continued to find in Martin "a model as a scholar and a poet, one whom I could follow" (HWMP). Still the coming together of Martin and Dunbar would be at first slow and deliberate. The year Martin arrived in Dayton, emerging African Ameri48

Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry

can poets included Don L. Lee, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Lucille Clifton; Audre Lorde and Mari Evans; Michael S. Harper and Alice Walker. In 1970 Charles Gordone won the Pulitzer Prize for No Place to BeSomebody and Maya Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Dunbar was not a recurrent topic at poetry readings. But the stage would soon be set for the centennial year in Dayton. In 1971 Addison Gayle contributed both The BlackAesthetic and a groundbreaking work on Dunbar: Oak and Ivy:A Biography ofPaulLaurence Dunbar. Perhaps even more influential was the flourishing of Broadside Press under the direction of Dudley Randall in Detroit and Randall's publication in 1971 of TheBlackPoets: A New Anthology. Still in print more than thirty years later, the book is an insightful account of what Randall called "the full range of black American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day" (xxiv). Dunbar is represented in Randall's "forerunners" with twelve poems. Although the deep and abiding relationship between the two Dayton poets would grow in very complex ways over the next three decades, it began tentatively. In a published announcement and invitation to the Dunbar celebration ("The Paul Laurence Dunbar Centennial Celebration"), Martin provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of his embattled relationship with Dunbar and insights as well on writing, performing, and teaching poetry: "It was long ago and I was much younger then, but it was in Birmingham, Alabama that I first knew who Paul Laurence Dunbar was and what he did."! Dunbar's poems were in his grade school textbooks along with a picture: "There he was in that famous picture, sitting very stately in that roth century high-collared shirt." He looked "awesome" to the young Martin, "but the years have changed that look to one of quiet dignity." The problem was that Martin's classmates thought he looked like Dunbar and their judgment became "a put down ... their way of taking out their frustrations" about having to read and recite the poems. "Imagine that kind of serious stamp being placed upon your life especially when you are young," Martin continues: "Nothing seemed further from my mind than making up poems that students had to read and memorize. It was a painful activity then, and no doubt it remains so, especially if you do not love the poem." Perhaps ironically, then, beginning in 1970 Martin found himself performing his own poetry and teaching at the University of Dayton. His office overlooked the cemetery, where Dunbar was buried, and Martin visited his grave often. He had also learned much more about Dunbar now: about his frustrations working as an elevator operator while trying to write, about the joys and pains of his marriage, about his friendship with the Wright Brothers, and about how maybe he and Dunbar had more in common than Sight-Reading Dunbar

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appearance. "I changed as the years changed," he admits in a journal entry, "and I realized that I did want to write, to be a singer of words and sounds" (HWMP). He understands and forgives his Birmingham boyhood antagonist, and now he begins to feel in Dayton a kind of destiny: "Of course this is an afterthought, but all roads seem to have led to Dunbar's state and two cities that he was closely associated with during his publishing years: Toledo and Dayton" (HWMP). Martin resolved to investigate more about this most famous literary resident of his new home. In fact, all roads did seem to lead from Toledo through New York City; Buffalo; Middlebury, Vermont; and Grand Rapids, Michigan-to Dayton. With this sense that the long quarrel was finally over, that he found himself inexplicably living and working in Dayton, and that someone ought to recognize properly an occasion so momentous as a one-hundredth birthday, Martin soon began plans for a centennial celebration that would grow in size and importance beyond his wildest dreams. Curiously, also, Dunbar and Martin still did not become all that much better friends during the initial planning, the grant writing, the invitations to speakers, the further study, or even the events as they unfolded. Because he was so much a part of the planning, Martin became preoccupied with how everything would work out. He knew something important was about to happen, but his own work as planner and troubleshooter numbed him to at least some of the impact as events began to unfold. In ways that could not have been predicted, several crucial developments during those days of celebration would change Martin's work and the works of many young African American poets for a long time to come. Martin began planning late in 1971, and he thought it best that events be scheduled for the fall of 1972, three months after Dunbar's birthday but when the school year would be back in swing. He sent inquiry letters in February to people he thought would be interested. After reminding potential participants about the upcoming centennial year, Martin continued, "Little is likely to be done unless someone gets the ball rolling. Therefore, I am proposing that many poets, novelists, playwrights, and actors convene in Dayton, Ohio on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first of October and that we undertake on the first day to give a complete reading of all of his poems" (sample letters in HWMP). He also suggested a marathon reading of poems written by participants in Dunbar's "memory and honor." Money for support would be tight ("That is always a problem!") yet he hoped to be able to provide travel expenses and prevail upon the goodwill of participants to reduce their ordinary fees. All along he had good University of Dayton support for the project. Years later in the dedication to PaulLaurence 50

HerbertWoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

Dunbar:A Singerof Songs (1979), he thanked University of Dayton English Chair B. J. Bedard for his "wisdom and encouragement ... at the center of the Dunbar Centennial Celebration." In his invitation to poets and scholars, he also asked help in reaching others "who may be interested" as a way of creating a celebration of "good faith and intent." Aware of the neglect and controversy attending Dunbar's reputation over time and unsure of how his proposal would be received, he concluded his letter: "So I send out this appeal, no matter what your stance is, to come to Dayton, and let us raise our voices and make stately music" (HWMP). It would be an understatement to note that people came to Dayton in very large numbers and that they made music that would resonate for some time to come. A distinguished group of poets, scholars, and performers honored Dunbar, and many of those participants noted how much they learned or relearned while there. Poets Alvin Aubert, Nikki Giovanni, Michael S. Harper, Etheridge Knight, Gloria C. Oden, Raymond Patterson, Sonia Sanchez, Lorenzo Thomas, and Alice Walker participated in the marathon reading of Dunbar and contributed tributes and commentary of their own. Novelists John Oliver Killen and Paule Marshall and scholar Saunders Redding remarked on Dunbar's legacy for their work. Martin orchestrated all the activities and read from his own "Deadwood Dick Poems." Quietly, his own participation in the Dunbar poetry marathon would signal a reawakening of sorts, a new discovery of his affinity with Dunbar, and the earliest plans for what would become his internationally acclaimed oneman show, PaulLaurence Dunbar: TheEyes of the Poet. People took home with them from Dayton many highlights and stirring memories. Dunbar's wife, Alice, had been Saunders Redding's high school English teacher, and he related little-known stories about Dunbar. Ron Jackson, director of creative writing at the Dayton Living Arts Center, performed his works. Michael S. Harper read Coltrane-like poems; Raymond Patterson shared "26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man," and actress Paulene Myers performed her one-woman show TheWorld ofMyAmerica, based on Dunbar's poetry. Nikki Giovanni was enjoying enormous popularity at the time and drew a huge and robust crowd. Etheridge Knight proclaimed that poetry is enlightenment: "It is the holiest of holies and we are here to commemorate Paul Laurence Dunbar, the poet." The highlights of the three days and perhaps the most lasting legacies of all the activities were the readings, the advice, the example offered by Margaret Walker, who not only received a standing ovation for her performance of her own classic "For My People" but also taught everyone in attendance how to read Dunbar. In his Ohio Authors Series monograph PaulLaurence Sight-Reading Dunbar

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Dunbar: A Singerof Songs, Martin recalls Walker's assessment of Dunbar's largest contribution to American poetry-the dialect poetry. Recalling that her mother read Dunbar to her before she could read him herself, Walker demonstrated to the large audience how to re-create and enjoy the humor of this poetry as well as its insight into folk-ways, folk-speech, and folk-beliefs. Walker was acutely aware of the politics of poetry in 1972, and she proclaimed loudly that it was totally acceptable, appropriate, and indispensable for poets to rediscover what she called the "treasury-house" of Dunbar's work (8). We have been getting it a little wrong, she told the audience. Dunbar's "tragic dilemma as a poet and as a black man" was that for a long time white Americans looked to him as the only black poet and they saw him as a poet almost entirely for his "jingle in a broken tongue" (8). The establishment had seen his work as "old darky tales" and amusing speech "within the vein of folklore in which they wished to classify all Negro life." So the problem was not just that white America laughed at the dialect poems but that failing to understand the authenticity and "home-spun philosophy" of dialect verse was yet "another vein of hard white racism that rejected the genius of Dunbar" (8). And so in 1972, one hundred years after Dunbar's birth in Dayton, Margaret Walker told everyone that they must not apologize for, or in any way overlook, the power and truth of Dunbar's language. Walker's remarks showed the way for others who first created a marathon reading of Dunbar's poems and then shared their own works over the three days. In "Reluctant Heir," Martin recalls how those in attendance came to understand that Dunbar's achievements were valid, that the dialect they had at times been ashamed of was a considerable achievement, and that much of Dunbar's work had in fact been widely shared in their families and churches without ever being credited to its author. Audiences had actually forgotten that they knew Dunbar all along. Margaret Walker showed them that and more. She showed them how to celebrate a legacy that was already a part of their collective experience. The celebration concluded with visits to Dunbar's home (now the Dunbar Museum) and to his gravesite in Woodland Cemetery. Another centenary year celebration followed in November at the University of California at Irvine featuring papers by Arna Bontemps, Darwin Turner, Gossie Hudson, Addison Gayle [r., James A. Emanuel, Kenny Jackson, J.Saunders Redding, and a performance by Roscoe Lee Browne, who read from Dunbar's works. Papers from those proceedings were published in JayMartin's collection A Singer in the Dawn and are detailed in the following discussion. The three-day birthday party in Dayton not only had a great impact on reassessments of Dunbar but also renewed commitments from poets who knew all along his impact. In her review of Martin's Ohio Authors' Series 52

Herbert WoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

Alice Walker and Martin at Dunbar Cent ennial in Dayton, 1972. Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Martin .

volum e on Dunbar, Margaret Walker proclaims , "It was the genius of Herbert Woodward Martin who arranged a centennial celebration in honor of the first major Black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar in Dayton, Ohio, October 1972 " (71) . In a copy of Revolutionary Petunias inscribed to Martin, Alice Walker wrote, "For He rb, who did som ething in Dayton that I will remember. Got me on stage and speaking and overcoming great tension, fear" (February 22, 1973, HWMP) . Nearly a de cade aft er the celebration M ichael S. Harper shared in a letter to Martin (March 16, 1981 , HWMP) his remembrance of the time he traveled with Martin and fellow poet Robert Hayden to visit Dunbar's grave. Over the next three decades and in several artistic and scholarly directions no one could then have predicted, Martin studied and presented to very diverse audiences ever increasing amounts of that wealth he found in Sight-Reading Dunbar

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Dunbar. Over time he has celebrated Dunbar's eye for beauty and humor, his precise sense of sorrow and pain, and his ability to express human emotion. Martin's own poetry has depicted the influence of Dunbar's clarity and his music. In The Shit-Storm Poems (1973), The Persistence of the Flesh (1976), and TheFormsofSilence (1980), he finds Dunbar to be an inspiration and validation who no longer represents any kind of "put down." In his readings throughout the seventies Martin began to include Dunbar's poems-not only "We Wear the Mask" and "Frederick Douglass" but also the trickier and always controversial dialect poems like "An Ante-Bellum Sermon" and even "The Party." His readings also included more and more spirituals as prompted by Dunbar's "When Malindy Sings." Slowly he moved toward the development of his own Dunbar show. Following the centennial celebration, Martin read some Dunbar poems at a local high school, and he was asked to present a Dunbar reading at the University of Dayton. Martin wondered if anyone would come, but on the night of that initial reading they had to bring in extra chairs. His now famous one-man show soon developed to feature as well "Accountability," "When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers," and "The Poet and His Song." Dunbar's authentic language and the ironies of his life's struggles also prompted Martin's historical research for The Logof the Vigilante-a work published in its first version in 1976-which moves back to the middle passage, the experiences of slavery, and the journey toward freedom. For the next twenty-five years he would revise and expand TheLog, and the guidance of what he learned from Dunbar can be seen in the manuscript revisions. Throughout the seventies we can observe the beginnings of four directions Dunbar scholarship has taken in the last twenty-five years, and Martin's contributions have been significant in each major breakthrough. In his own scholarship and in testimonials to Dunbar across the country, he broke ground for more recent commentaries by Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates [r., as well as for Joanne M. Braxton's Collected Poetryof Paul Laurence Dunbar (1993). He is also in the forefront of the second major direction of Dunbar studies, which showcases the poet's contributions to American drama, the musical, and opera. In collaboration with Adolphus Hailstork, Martin created PaulLaurence Dunbar: Common Ground, debuted by the Dayton Opera Company in 1993. Moreover, no study of Dunbar can match his one-man show for insight into Dunbar's life and work. Currently his performances number more than fifty a year across the globe. He has also starred in two videos, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1984) and Paul Laurence Dunbar:TheEyes ofthe Poet (1992). He not only brings Dunbar alive on stage but also gives audiences a genuine feel for the full range and complexity of 54

Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry

a body of work often obscured by critical misapprehensions and controversies. He has also greatly expanded audiences for Dunbar beyond the conventional readers of published poetry or academic criticism. Mark Bernstein has likened the literary partnership of Dunbar and Martin to a dance that did not begin well. It was not love at first sight, Bernstein notes, recalling the stories Martin has told often about being blamed by boyhood friends for distasteful school assignments. "But years later when the grown-up Dr. Martin, poet and professor, met the long-dead Mr. Dunbar, poet and elevator operator, the old voice found a new singer" (23). The symmetry was more than stylistic, however, and the partnership soon took on an aura of inevitability. The lives of Dunbar and Martin took "a good deal of time to cross," Bernstein observes: "By the time Herb Martin settled in Dayton, he was nearly the age Dunbar had reached at his death." Some might find an irony in that or perhaps a continuation of work cut short. While the lessons learned and the teachers observed were often different, today "the dance goes gracefully ... when a man in a black frock coat takes a small step toward his audience and sings in a water-smooth voice 'In the morning when I rise ... ,,, (23), Bernstein concludes, "Martin is a perfect partner for Dunbar." In this confident, elegant, and fluid dance, "Martin brings to his performances an actor's sense of gesture and a voice that is nimble and doubting, a chiding falsetto, a declaiming baritone, sanctified or sanctimonious as needs be." Just as members of the best dance pairs must also "move apart, to recoup and clarify," Martin sets limits to the collaboration. Dunbar takes over the stage for an hour but is not allowed to dominate every day for an hour. Finally, Martin's new partnership with his boyhood nemesis prompted him to investigate Dunbar's life, the places they shared in the city of Dayton as well as many historical documents and manuscripts often overlooked. In the process of mastering the practical expertise of a performer, his investigations led to his discovery of several long-lost manuscripts of plays and essays that Dunbar wrote between 1898 and 1904. Researching on the Carter G. Woodson Historical Papers in the Library of Congress in 1992, he found a forty-page manuscript of a play, Herrick, written by Dunbar but never published. Since that time he has discovered several additional plays, essays, stories, musical lyrics, poems, and fragments that greatly expand the Dunbar canon. These are now published in the volume In HisOwn Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar (see chapter 8). The words of the dedication to this volume take us back again to the seventies and the significant events of the centennial celebration: "For Margaret Walker Alexander who, before she left us, unraveled the veil over our eyes and taught us how to sight read Dunbar's infinite music." Sight-Reading Dunbar

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Some misdirection in a century of Dunbar criticism often had closed off areas of exploration that Martin's work has effectively pried open for renewed questioning and enjoyment. Dunbar is best known, of course, as the wearer of the mask that grins as it shades the myriad subtleties of African American life in Dayton, Ohio, at the turn of the last century. Martin's oneman show brings to life Dunbar the subtle craftsman of dramatic irony and camouflage in "An Ante- Bellum Sermon," the confident lyricist of "Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes," "Invitation to Love," "When Malindy Sings," or "In the Morning." In spite of controversies about the dialect poems, Martin reveals Dunbar as a master of characterization in "The Party," a musician on top of his rhetorical ironies in "Accountability," a consummate storyteller and eulogizer in "When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers." His performance also helps audiences to see and feel how Dunbar anticipated and influenced major figures from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights movement-preparing the way, for example, for Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King in the poem "He Had His Dream." He showcases as well the sophistication of Dunbar as he commented ironically and self-reflexively on the literary scene of the time in poems such as "The Dilettante: A Modern Type." In another of his best-known works, "The Poet," Dunbar showed his clear sense of how his poems were generally read: "He sang of life serenely sweet, / With now and then, a deeper note." But while Dunbar did voice "the world's absorbing beat," the world mostly turned to "praise / A Jingle in a broken tongue" (Collected Poetry 191). That absorbing beat comes to life in Martin's one-man show and in the video in which he starred (based on the show), Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Eyes of the Poet (1992). Without pausing to debate about whether dialect is effective political expression, Martin re-creates the genuineness of characters, the beauty and naturalness of language, the ease and sting of imagery, and the subtle contours of how humor and anger alternate, merge, and temper each other. In bestowing upon Martin the 1996 Bjornson Award for Distinguished Service in the Humanities, the Ohio Humanities Council called his portrayal of Dunbar "remarkable" and "mesmerizing" and "extraordinarily generous in sharing the power of the humanities with a large and diverse public." The Humanities Council noted that the award was recognition as well for Martin's programs on "Oral Traditions in African Literature" and "Black Women Writers." Moreover, the council reported that Martin is "consistently the most sought after member of their Speakers Bureau" ("Herbert Woodward Martin to Receive Bjornson Humanities Award" 7-8). Martin's depiction of Dunbar creates significant openings for audiences to feel for themselves that"absorbing beat." He also brings his acute sense of 56

Herbert WoodwardMartin and the AfricanAmerican Tradition in Poetry

irony to each performance. The angry poems and sweet lyrics are not isolated into separate sections of the evening. Martin's tone, voice, and demeanor do not shift exaggeratedly from the dialect narratives to the love songs to the self-reflexive critical commentaries. The show is all one piece; its rhythm combines the variety of Dunbar's voices and themes in much the same way that Dunbar himself found joy in sadness and expressed bittersweet complexities where critics often looked for humor in dialect. Martin's portrayal of Dunbar has long been ahead of its time. The ease and natural flow with which his performances knit Dunbar's variety into a whole have often cut against the grain of even the most informed Dunbar commentators. In the process, he has made Dunbar accessible to new audiences, to different audiences, and to people not used to buying poetry collections or attending poetry readings. At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Frederick Douglass introduced Dunbar into literary circles. In 1896 Dunbar published Lyrics ofLowlyLife, the volume many consider to be his best. In that same year William Dean Howells put Dunbar on the map in his review of Majorsand Minors. It is a matter of record how debates about whether and how to write dialect or standard-English poems shaped critical commentary and reader accessibility for the next half-century. Martin's performances of Dunbar have always been themselves a kind of corrective critical commentary in which he restores the poems to their place in the oral tradition, in the mainstream of African American life, and in their legacy for writers to come later, from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. Joanne M. Braxton has recently reminded us (Dunbar, Collected Poetry) that reading Dunbar requires demythologizing many interpretations that have become attached to his texts. Looking back to the Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader (1975), Braxton notes a series of myths that readers have to work through in their experience of Dunbar's works. First, dialect poems must be seen for their authenticity and artistry, and not be attached to a residual racism or perpetuation of stereotypes. While Dunbar's characters have been associated with negative elements from plantation myths to minstrel shows, the pride of celebrating daily life is its own triumph over racial stereotypes. The frequent dismissal of Dunbar's nondialect poems created a strange warp in readers' perceptions that somehow African American poets should not range too far away from issues of race. Then, too, the standard critical line on Dunbar tended to downplay most of his political themes and to ignore ways in which some of his work was a conventional, predictable, but decent reworking of typical poetic modes of time. Even the failure to examine the poetry's conventionality was itself a means of prejudgment about what was worth readers' attention. Sight-Reading Dunbar

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Martin's portrayal of Dunbar moves this demythologizing along swiftly and naturally. On stage he presents anger and humor that blend through irony. The dialect and standard English patterns flow into and through each other. Martin weaves into his performances what Braxton has identified as Dunbar's experiments with German American, Irish American, and Midwestern dialects. Martin's Dunbar takes his place in both the black and white American poetic traditions. His interpretive commentaries on Dunbar have also anticipated several recent developments in literary theory-most notably, what Mikhail Bahktin has called heteroglossic voice in literature (Dialogic Imagination). Applied to Dunbar as well as to Martin's own considerable body of work, Bahktin's notion of the "polyvocal" and his insights on the role of "carnival" help us understand how the partnership between Dunbar and Martin works. In Bahktinian terms, Dunbar's characters and his controversial dialect poems neither accept nor overtly attack life on the plantation. Rather, like much of the world's great literature from Chaucer to Dostoevsky to Langston Hughes, Dunbar's speakers achieve what Bahktin called a parodic doubling where a multiple perspective sets in motion a dialogical hybrid of corrective laughter at existing conditions (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics). Dunbar expresses the pain through laughter even as he brings to life the joys and injustices he experienced. For decades, Martin has been preserving for audiences what we might now call Dunbar's heteroglossia as well as his keen ear for the way African American life has so often reveled in a carnivalesque description of many recognizable rituals and conventions of American life of his time. Rather than polarizing Dunbar's multivocalists into politically charged oppositions, a Bahktinian reading will recognize and celebrate the artistry of how conflicting moods, complex characters, and near opposite emotions merge together dialogically in the realities of daily life. Martin's performances not only create new audiences for the poetry but also bring characters and experiences previously relegated to the periphery on to the main stage. Martin's interpretive commentaries on Dunbar have advanced his longstanding commitment to enabling us to see an important American poet with greater clarity. His performances bring alive the multivocal dimensions of Dunbar from the perspective of a post-Bahktinian heteroglossic critique. In "The Party" and "An Ante-Bellum Sermon," we hear the pleasures ofjouissance and the deliberate excess of "carnival." We see "Accountability" and "When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers" as heteroglossic texts that capture the beauty and contradictions of the experiences of ordinary people. Dunbar's works do not oppose acquiescence and political action or set dialect against conventional forms. Instead, his characters combine and inter58

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pret the disparate elements of our experience. As the poetry comes alive in Martin's performances, Dunbar's masks are also our masks. Audiences are entertained and learn as well as they experience along with Dunbar's characters times of sweet pleasure and quiet desperation, anger and joy, confusion and breakthrough moments of intense clarity. In PaulLaurence Dunbar:A Singer ofSongs, Martin provided backstage looks at how he created his one-man show as well as insights on how Dunbar's achievements have influenced the composition and performance of his own poems. (Unless otherwise noted, references in these next few paragraphs are to this work.) Dunbar taught Martin not to shy away from the authentic speech patterns of simple everyday people or to confuse those authentic voices with the stereotypes others have misconstrued. He quotes Dunbar's letter to Helen Douglass, dated October 22, 1896, in which he notes, "I am sorry to find among intelligent people those who are unable to differentiate dialect as a philological branch from the burlesque of Negro Minstrelsy" (10). Martin takes on that challenge in performance as well, and he works to refine a low-keyed subtlety that also concerned Dunbar. In that same letter to Helen Douglass, Dunbar praises what he calls the "rather rare trait called good taste which prevents me from giving a memorial for the dead at a public entertainment of such a nature. People of good taste do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves or drag their respect, a most sacred emotion out before ... the public gaze" (10). Martin wanted his show to be that kind of entertainment, with Dunbar's own sense of good taste and respect guiding him at every step. Martin's performance of the dialect poems captures Dunbar's cleverness and humor. In "An Ante-Bellum Sermon," for example, the preacher is "astute enough not to give away his purpose or intent too soon," so he "suspends the announcement of his subject" and suddenly "without a word of warning he is enacting the subject" (11). Before listeners know what is happening to them "they are taken in by the action and made full participants" in the ironies of the preacher's activism in spite of his numerous disclaimers about how he is not preaching revolution. Martin captures the subtle tones and the "rhetorical stance," where the "subject of this sermon is freedom, even though the preacher shrewdly protects himself' (11). His plans for performance show how his dramatic readings critique the poems. Every poem Dunbar wrote, Martin concludes, is "a protest of some situation, attitude, or seemingly incurable problem that needs solving" (14). "The Haunted Oak" portrays the multiple atrocities of a lynching. "Harriet Beecher Stowe" explores the power and influence of the word. "The Unsung Heroes" celebrates whites who worked for the abolition of slavery. "When Malindy Sight-Reading Dunbar

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Sings" reenacts the pleasure of music and explores controversies about learned abilities and natural talent. What Martin strives for most is a rendering of Dunbar's "natural ear for the sounds he encounters and a gifted eye for detail" (16). When he performs "The Party," for example, "The speaker is telling this story to a friend and making the party happen all over again. The reader is allowed to participate vicariously as well" (16). He hopes his audiences-many of whom do not read collections of poems-will experience that vicarious participation as well; he wants them to feel with Dunbar that they are a part of "the human condition" that is "charm and delight." At once he addresses controversies about the plantation poets and puts into practice Margaret Walker's all-important lessons in sight-reading: "We are touched by the characters' humor and impressed by their ingenuity. There is a pure joy here, one that avoids stereotypes and at the same time offers a momentary glimpse into plantation life, which, according to all factual reports, could not always have been so happy" (18). Perhaps there is an echo here of a poem by Nikki Giovanni, from the early seventies, in which she wanted to dispel that stereotypical unhappiness of the childhood of African Americans. In spite of difficulties and often against all odds, she reminds readers that she was very happy. What he seeks to portray on stage is how Dunbar "taught us not only how to endure pain but how to laugh" (23). What Dunbar entrusts with Martin and he in turn passes on to us is that the black people of a hundred years ago are "rich in imagination and in their determination to share with each other the happiness that can be found even in the worst of conditions" (19). For "those of us who read him with special and personal interest," he recalls, Dunbar has left these stage directions: "When all is done, and my last word is said / And ye who loved me murmur 'He is dead,' / Let no one weep, for fear that I should know / And sorrow too thatye should sorrow so" (23). He often closes his show with one of the following poems that emphasize as well Dunbar's rich imagination. "The Poet and His Song" explores the joys of singing and concludes: "Sometimes the sun, unkindly hot, / My garden makes a desert spot; / Sometimes a blight upon the tree / Takes all my fruit away from me; / And then with throes of bitter pain / Rebellious passions rise and swell; / But-life is more than fruit or grain, / And so I sing, and all is we11."2 An even more likely and fitting conclusion to Martin's show of varied music, multiple forms, and complex emotions is the deceptively simple poem "Life." "A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in, / A minute to smile and an hour to weep in, / A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, / And never a laugh but the means come double; / And that is life!" (8). He sometimes begins his show with this poem; on other evenings it is the concluding poem following perhaps a spiritual. 60

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But wherever the concluding stanza is placed, Dunbar's lines can equally prepare audiences for what is coming or send them home thinking about all they have heard: "A crust and a corner that love makes precious, / With a smile to warm and the tears to refresh us; / And joy seems sweeter when cares come after, / And a mean is the finest of foils for laughter; / And that is life" (8). Dunbar reintroduced Martin in 1972 to the authentic speech patterns of slaves' daily lives. Their developing partnership also advanced much of what he was already doing in his own writing, encouraged him to incorporate spirituals into his performances, and provided material that enabled him to widen his audiences considerably beyond the program of poetry readings often attended largely by academics. In several other important ways Martin's timely rediscovery of Dunbar validated the difficult choices he had already made as a young poet and encouraged him to avoid the traps of categorization he had so far escaped in his work. It is no doubt significant that in an interview with Isthmus (University of Toledo, March 10, 1969), Dunbar's name never comes up. Nonetheless, Martin explains why his poetry is not often linked with political causes: "I would rather write, (since that is the only thing I know how to do) rather than become a social commentator." When he goes on to elaborate on the social comments he does strive to achieve, the parallels with Dunbar's protest poems are remarkable: "I suppose that in some sense, when people read my pieces, there is some sort of social comment. There is a protest against people being lonely. I suppose essentially that is what my work is about." The next year in an interview with Eve Shelnutt, Martin addressed further the place of militance and violence in poetry. Grimacing at "that awful question" he no doubt expected to be asked, he responded: "Yeah, my students make militant demands of me .... But I object violently to the demands. I won't submit. I have written poems that I feel are just as angry as anybody else's poems. I don't have to call dirty names and shout" ("UD's Herb Martin" 20). Besides, he adds, "one's militancy is arrived at through private routes" (20). Martin had just arrived in Dayton, had just begun teaching at the University of Dayton, and the absence of Dunbar in this interview only hints at the relationship that would develop over the next few years. Dunbar's genuine' abiding, and private forms of protest parallel Martin's intent. Shelnutt observes, "In answer to the books on violence in his office and to the demands of his more militant students, Herb Martin lives out the alternative of discrete expression in his classes and in his own craft" (21). Martin's career up to the early seventies had prepared him to encounter Dunbar's life and works. All roads did seem to lead to Dayton, and Martin had accomplished a great deal that made him ready. Dunbar's influence Sight-Reading Dunbar

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turned out to be incalculable. In ways we are now coming to realize more fully, the range of Dunbar's literary output was astonishing: dialect as well as standard English poems, love songs and protest poems, plays, musicals, and essays-all of which became a part of, in one way or another, the poems Martin wrote; the dramatic presentations he orchestrated and directed; the way he performed poems, plays, and songs on stage; the opera librettos he composed; and the research he conducted to unearth and make accessible manuscripts that had been ignored or lost. Dunbar and Martin remain a productive team to this day. His distinguished predecessor in Dayton helped him to negotiate many land mines that awaited young poets in the seventies. He influenced to a considerable degree all of Martin's books over the next thirty years. Martin's reconstruction of Dunbar in performance has brought both poets more into the American literary tradition and introduced many nonreaders of poetry to the joys and the powers of the word. Just as Dudley Randall's Broadside Press had provided in the 1970S tapes of poems read by the poets and broadsides where people could read poems uninterrupted by pagination, Martin in performance empowered a widening community of new fans of poetry. Nearly two decades after the Dayton Dunbar Centennial, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has shown us many ways in which literature from the page comes alive only in performance ("Canon-Formation"). In revitalizing literature through performance, the partnership of Martin and Dunbar was state-of-the-art. Gates was looking ahead to the publication of his own influential Norton AnthologyofAfricanAmericanLiterature, but his predictions would hold true as well for the plans and achievements of Herbert Woodward Martin: "Incorporating performance and the black and human voice into our anthology," Gates observes, "we will change fundamentally not only the way that our literature is taught but the way in which any literary tradition is even conceived" ("Canon-Formation" 182). Martin's video tape, PaulLaurence Dunbar: TheEyes of the Poet, continues to change the ways in which we conceive of a literary tradition. His oneman show also continues to illustrate for us how Dunbar's poems and his legacy in works by many to come after him may be experienced. Martin's video brings together a dozen poems as well as excerpts from Dunbar's letters and essays and comments from other scholars. TheBrief Study Guide accompanying the tape provides a Dunbar chronology and discussion questions for each selection. The poems on the video include many from his show-which keeps evolving: "The Poet and His Song," "Opportunity," "The Real Question," "Accountability," "An Ante-Bellum Sermon," "Discovered," "A Negro Love Song," "Invitation to Love," "In the Morning," "He Had His 62

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Dream," "We Wear the Mask," "When Malindy Sings," "The Haunted Oak," "When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers," "An Easy-Coin' Feller," and "Life." He incorporates as well many spirituals into the tape. A brief excerpt from Dunbar's letter to Dr. Henry A. Tobey (July 13,1895) summarizes his overriding goal as a writer: "I did once want to be a lawyer, but that ambition has long since died out before the all-absorbing desire to be a worthy singer of the songs of God and nature. To be able to interpret my own people through song and story." In their sharing of that all-absorbing desire, the partnership between Dunbar and Martin keeps growing. Martin has already begun planning for another Dunbar Centennial in Dayton-this one to commemorate the centenary of Dunbar's death to come in 2006. From his first evening-long performance of Dunbar poems during Black History Week in Dayton in February 1973 to today's show that continues to evolve in its music, gesture, choreography, and expanding Dunbar canon, Martin renegotiates his pact with his fellow Dayton laureate. He recalls the first performance of the fully staged show in 1978. He had been acting at the same time in A MidsummerNight'sDream in Dayton and his hair was braided for his role of Puck. So he debuted the full Dunbar show with his braids tucked up under a borrowed Amish hat. Through it all, Martin remains fascinated with the mentor he had for so long resisted. In a Dayton DailyNews interview Martin responds to Tom Archdeacon's question about his own dreams: "Martin thought a moment. He ruminated on a Nobel Prize or a poetry Pulitzer, then amended rhyme with reason" (4B). Again the partnership is an important part of the dreams: "The best thing would be to write some poems that last. I'd love it if some of my literature stayed alive, so that one day-a hundred years from now-there might be someone in Goodwill clothes standing on a stage reading my work too" (4B).

Sight-Reading Dunbar

·4·

"Interrupted Rhythms" From The Shit-Storm Poems to

The Persistence of the Flesh

If men shut their doors against fear It is because you have burned the crosses. It is because you have murdered the night. If there is no music in the land It is because you have interrupted the rhythm. -"Address to Mr. Charlie" In the spring of 1970 while he was poet-in-residence at Aquinas College, Martin returned to Ohio for a series of poetry readings. One stop on his schedule was in Dayton, home of his longtime friendly nemesis and future partner, Paul Laurence Dunbar. As some kind of destiny would have it, the University of Dayton offered him a position as assistant professor. More than thirty years and numerous additional roles, titles, and awards later, he is still there. While becoming increasingly settled professionally, Martin continued to work in several art forms. In 1971 his poems set to music by New York composer Joseph Fennimore received acclaim in the Village Voice. At the same time, his work was anthologized by, among others, Arnold Adoff and Robert Hayden. Poems and interviews appeared as well in a wide variety of journals and literary magazines. His one-act play A Dialogue was published in The Urban Reader, and he continued to take on a variety of dramatic roles in plays from Medea to MacBird. In the summer of 1972 he returned to the Breadloaf School of English, where he graduated (M.Litt.) and, as class president, delivered the commencement address. That summer he traveled to Venice, where he met Ezra Pound. After Pound died later that year, Martin began a decade-long project to collect and publish poems in tribute to one of the most significant influences on his own work. In the fall, eleven of

Martin's new and previously published poems appeared in 10 MichiganPoets. He had also spent much of that year planning the Dunbar Centennial Celebration, which he hosted in Dayton in October. The following February, he organized and presided over a Black History Week celebration for Central Michigan University-a gathering that included Alvin Aubert, Dudley Randall, Melba Boyd, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Quincy Troupe, and Alice Walker. In the fall of 1973 he accepted a position as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Central Michigan University, where he spent a semester in residence teaching, writing, and lecturing on a variety of topics. In November he also acted in a reader's theater production of The Sirensof Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, and his second collection of poetry, The Shit-Storm Poems, was published by Pilot Press (1973). The gathering of poets for Black History Week 1973 was representative of the highly charged atmosphere for the arts at the time. Martin had read his own works for the first time at Central Michigan University to very enthusiastic response in 1972, and he returned the next year to spearhead the weeklong series of lectures, performances, readings, and a forum on black poetry in the seventies. The campus newspaper (CentralMichiganLife) of February 23, 1973, reported, "Crowd drawn to poetry readings." Black World editor Hoyt Fuller began the celebration, and the week's events included gospel music, films, theater, and dance as well as a soul food dinner. In addition to the poetry reading, which drew twelve hundred people, Dudley Randall, Etheridge Knight, Melba Boyd, and Quincy Troupe led a discussion on "Directions for Black Poets in the 1970s." Randall spoke of the second renaissance of black poets underway. Troupe contrasted where they were going with the efforts of the sixties, which he called a time of "sensationalism" and talk of burning things down: "I don't feel like I have to tell you that you are black anymore. I want to talk about love and interpersonal relationships." Knight emphasized that poetry would become "more and more what it used to be-a spoken thing, an oral art." In response to audience questions, Aubert noted that many white readers had been "sheltered from the black experience which they could approach with humility." All panelists felt that the poetry of the seventies would go on to be less narrow than it had been in the sixties. This gathering in the Michigan winter had its roots in Dayton the previous fall at the Dunbar Centennial. Central Michigan University faculty members and students had traveled to Dayton, and Martin assembled for them four months later a reunion of several of the symposium members. Fueled in part by the political controversies of the times, there was great enthusiasm for poetry readings-for the poems themselves and especially for the "Interrupted Rhythms"

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community ceremonies that performances had become. Discussions, debates, and other forums followed the readings, and the oral tradition that Dunbar had celebrated more than seventy-five years earlier was taking hold on campuses, in videos, and in the cassette tapes and broadsides published by Broadside Press. Martin's skill at planning these ceremonies grew out of his dedication to performance and the black oral tradition and his commitment to bring together various forms of expression in his own work and in the works of others. Bringing together a variety of people and media in counterpoint structures was becoming the main interest of his career as well as his principal way of avoiding the land mines planted for young writers at the time. Martin negotiated his way carefully through the polarization of the early seventies. He avoided becoming a part of any of the factions or camps that often accompanied various forms of political rhetoric. He continued to combine music, theater, and the black oral tradition in his written texts and performances. He also continued to blend in his counterpoint artistry ingredients of the African American literary conventions. At the same time he was able to bring together what some see as very different and even opposed elements of political protest and themes thought to be universal. Robert Hayden, David J. Burrows, and Fredrick R. Lapides selected for their anthology Afro-American Literature: An Introduction (1971) two types of poets who represented current controversies over the function of African American poetry. On the one hand, there is "a spokesman for his people, an exhorter, and a propagandist." At the same time, there is the poet whose"only obligation is to speak the truth as he sees it and keep as his objective the creation of a genuine poetry that will be universal in its appeal" (103). They indicate that their collection represents both points of view. Martin is represented in the volume by "A Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary," a poem referred to in Time magazine as a "notable flashpoint in the literature about Vietnam" (April 20, 1981, 33). In that poem and in his stormy poems of the early seventies, Martin's counterpoint imagination made him comfortable and effective as a propagandist with universal appeal. The Shit-Storm Poems is a forty-page volume containing twenty-four poems and the extended series "The Deadwood Dick Poems." The somewhat startling title grew out of three quotations-one from Eldridge Cleaver, who warned, "I say, after Mailer, 'There's a shit-storm coming,'" and another from Richard Wright: "Lawd, Man! Ef it wuzn't fer them polices 'n them 01' lynch-mobs, there wouldn't be nothing but uproar down here!" The third is an allusion to the spiritual "Been in the Storm So Long." In this collection Martin starts right in without an overture: "My mother is conservative, / My father is liberally dead. / I'm going to radicalize my future! You hear 66

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what I said" ("White Man Let My Nigger Go" 9). And he comes right back in even stronger tones: "I don't wanta fuck your mama, / Poppa, sister, brother, uncle / Aunt, your grands, great grands / Or your eleven dozen first, second, and third cousins. / Mother, all I want is for you to / Stop fucking over me and my brothers and sisters" ("Poem" 10). In a situation calling for a knock-out punch, Martin asks a probing question: "Do not compromise me in my blackness. / My flesh knows what breaks the heart. / Hate modifies a variety of men: / Where only the cockroaches are allowed / To observe them in their particular conditions. / Have you never heard the soul scream prayers?" ("Poem" 11). At this point in his performances of these poems Martin would sing the third major influence on the title-the spiritual "Been in the Storm So Long"-and immediately proceed without even a breath's break to "I Love my black folks / I love my white folks too / Guess I don't have any choice / Till this 01' war gets through. / Ain' goin' to sit in no rocker! / Ain' goin' to sit in no chair! / Goin' to speak for right, / Till this 01' war gets through" ("Poem" 12). Martin's counterpoint is once again set in motion: black and white, love and hate, speaking out and silence, war and peace-as he reflects and attempts to move beyond the polarization of the times. A series of short mood pieces and motivation poems provides a transition to the pivotal angry rant of the volume. "I'm not a violent man," he begins: "I've tried Christ / But one slap on either of these cheeks / I think will sufficiently do!" With overtones of Countee Cullen's "Heritage" and all the ambivalence of debates on religion and slavery, the poet moves from simmer to boil: "Don't you give in to no foolish impulse / Ain't no tellin' what I might do" ("Poem" 13). Another spiritual follows: perhaps "Go Down Moses" or "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" Soon the oppositions suggest a possibility for genuine sharing: "God is a prisoner behind the blackman's teeth / Where the tongue has forgotten the taste of human things. / Death, my brother, / My distinguisher / Count my fingers, / Count my bones." Finally, the concluding line, which is almost always synthesis in Martin's contrapuntal vision: "We need each other to see" ("Poem" 15). This poem of sharp contrasts is glossed significantly by his commentary in "Epistle from My Heart" in a memoir in the form of a letter addressed to fellow poet Roy Scheele. Martin's images are intended to counter "traditional white stereotype beliefs" that "all Negroes have white teeth and that God is white" (the quotes that follow are on pages 27-29). Teeth also represent bars or "weapons that protect that paradoxical instrument of good and evil: the tongue." When the tongue forgets what it is to be human, he regrets, "Then it is time we give up and turn everything over to the computers." No one listened to Baldwin's "Interrupted Rhythms"

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warning in TheFire Next Time, he tells his friend, Roy-and we are a divided nation, people, and race: "In 1972 it is still a miracle if a black man escapes from the ghetto into which he was born." This letter addressing issues Martin considers urgent is dated February 16, 1972, and suggests that cooperation can flourish after opposition. "The assumptive naivete that individuals can absolve themselves of the problem is no longer valid," he concludes. Neither division nor isolation can be tolerated any longer. We will "need each other to see" precisely because anything else is a trap: "Let me truthfully say that blacks and whites, young ones especially, realize that for this society to succeed the problem still is building a substantial two-way street which will support the activities of common goals." This extended set of short pieces-each with the same title, "Poem"has set the stage for "Address to Mr. Charlie," which is almost a classical rant, delivered with the forceful rhetoric of a Malcolm X speech and modulated in a variety of moods from the confrontational to the plaintive. "I have watched you murder my people and said nothing," the address begins: "I have watched you incarcerate them and said nothing / I have watched you sentence them to rooms of filth" (17). It is time for "Shylock in black skin" to speak up and seek the revenge in lessons taught by Mr. Charlie: "I have seen the dogs bite my people / I have watched you billy their mind's pride / I have seen them madly marched to wars, / To defend a democracy they cannot share" (17). The proclamation is blunt and angry. Mr. Charlie has burned the cities and killed the people, and the speaker wants to be unshackled: "Speak me no heaven / What is, is now." Dunbar's mask is back but the tune is more cynical ("If we smile in your eye / You have taught the smile"), and the resolution radically different ("We learned the lessons / We are the master now"). And so the music has been stopped, and when it does seep back through it is shrill: "If there is no music in the land / It is because you have interrupted the rhythm" (17). "Address to Mr. Charlie" is dedicated to LeRoi Jones, who was a Beat poet with Allen Ginsberg and others in the 1950S and later-as Imamu Amiri Baraka-became a major spokesperson in the revolutionary theater. Baraka called 1969 the year of reconstruction and In OurTerribleness (1970) expressed his commitment to political writing. "Let there be no love poems written / until love can exist freely and / cleanly," he wrote in "Black Art" (Henderson, Understanding 214), and "Calling all black people, come in, black people, come / on in," he urged in "SGS" (Henderson, Understanding 212). Martin's dedication to Baraka shows his respect for the protest poetry of the timethough he himself took a softer approach. He appreciated what Baraka called "dipthongized culture" or the appropriation to race of "a suffering and, sub68

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sequently, a grace and hegemony of virtue which was more properly seen as the common lot of the oppressed" (Bigsby, SecondBlackRenaissance 287). But he also told Eve Shelnutt in an interview in 1970 that Baraka had become a "Radical Exile Negro"-and that many of the controversial questions about who is or is not radical are "Moot, since one's militancy is arrived at through private routes" (Rap, November 1970). Looking back nearly thirty years later he confided, "I am not sure what I think of the sixties now. It was a turbulent time. It was a time of righteous indignation." His rethinking went a little farther: "I think there was a necessity for the anger which comes out of The Shit-StormPoems. There are some poems which I do not any longer endorse, and I would have to think hard and long before putting them in a selected or collected edition" (letter to the author, November 1998, HWMP). Martin's personal routes to militancy are reflected in the angry parts of The Shit-Storm Poems, but he did not agree entirely with many militants of the time who felt that black art could not be achieved in the literary mainstream. Martin chose to work in a variety of streams-main and otherwise. Through a contrapuntal mix of various genres and styles, he wanted to juxtapose the black oral traditions with many conventions considered mainstream. His sympathies were with another poet who was often conventional but who knew how to write an angry poem of his own. A lengthy passage from a well-known and influential essay by Langston Hughes deserves to be quoted in its entirety: But then there are the lowdown folks, the so-called common element and they are the majority Their joy runs, bang! Into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him-if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question. ("The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," in Gates, NortonAnthology 1268) Even in the angriest portions of the "shit-storm," Martin avoided becoming factionalized or standardized. Once again he found himself on his own, working in counterpoint at the intersection of boundaries that many others could "Interrupted Rhythms"

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see only as polarization. Writing in 1973, Miller Williams concluded that Martin "speaks with a humane voice, at the same time compassionate and angry, and rightly. Such rage and pity move together only in those of a gentle and terrible humanity, a good people who live with both, by bringing out of the cauldron something shaped like themselves" (book jacket for The ShitStorm Poems). Quietness and gentleness counterbalance the anger in this collection. "The ducks float to and fro / On the water that redeems and destroys," one passage notes, and the concluding line is an epitome of the contrasts that the volume presents: "0, paradox" ("Poem" 14). Again, the quiet dominates: "Death is a compound of silent moments / Against which the mind plays a silent music." Moths playing outside the window might soon find the crack in the window "And come into the candle" ("Poem" 16). The volume also continues the "Antigone" series from New York the Nine Million and Other Poems and adds the silence of a cemetery poem contrasting the old graves that "relatives have long since / Placed beside obsolete figures in their memory" and "The new ones which are quick in the survivor's brain." The poet resolves to teach the old graves that "There is something sacred in the memory" ("The Old Graves" 25). And in the hustle of "Grand Central Station" two people "cross paths and miss each other in the madness," "circling the pagoda of information." In a conclusion that is contrapuntal, the irresolution is celebrated: "No one is ever sure of the promises he makes / We make ceremony from all sorts of occasions" (40). Several very different kinds of speakers and stories round out The ShitStorm Poems. In the first part of a paired sequence an angry ("Woman, on your rough road. I grew old") and narcissistic man ("I'm going to look in the mirror and see myself fine") tells an unnamed woman that all his woe has come from loving her, that "all women are the same because vanity is your game." In the end he will only let her look at his wonderful presence: "wag your greedy tongue; lick your red lips, roll your eyes / Then let the window dresser pull the drapes / Because my price is too high" ("The Exorcism" 36). Whether or not this speaker was exorcised, the poem reads like the first part of a dialogue where there is as yet no response. Martin recalls that it took more than a year to hear the lady's response, which he first published as a broadside under the title "At the Five and Dime" and then rewrote as "The Lady Has Her Say" for his next book, ThePersistence oftheFlesh (1976). "Listen to me, Woolworth Man, / Who you think needs a store-bought boy / That's got a price tag on his leg?" She blasts off. She isn't much interested, she says, in "a pretty toy." She wants "a real story man with life in his craw / who understands what it takes to give, / who feels the pulse to live" and who can 70

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generate heat all through her house. She matches his high price with stingily blithe indifference: "So go right ahead; / Take a train, fly a plane / Hop in a car / Double, triple the distance, / Make it four times as far, / Don't hesitate for my sake, / Store bought man, / I got you at the five and dime" (64). Though separated by time and published in two different books, "The Exorcism" and "The Lady Has Her Say" are obvious counterpoint recollections on what happened and what counts in two characters' lives. In performance, Martin pairs the two poems one after the other-and readers might want to create their own contrapuntal poem by alternating the lines as if the two characters were on stage together. It could work like this, and the resultant clashes might even invite music: Before I leave this town Listen to me, Woolworth Man There is one thing you ought to know Who you think needs a store bought boy? The first time I said I Loved You That's got a price tag on his leg I was as honest as the summer's warm Who you think's anxious to possess a pretty toy? The possibilities are many for reading down columns or across, as in the series of contrapuntal poems, and there are no doubt issues about who should get to speak first-or, more important, last. Consider possible endings where the lady has moved to the left and the man to the right for their denouements: Don't hesitate for my sake Lick your red lips, roll your eyes Store bought Man Then let the window dresser pull the drapes I got you at the five and dime Because my price is too high. Martin has not played this counterpoint game in performance of these poems, but readers could do this on their own with interesting effects. While the speakers maintain their distinctive identities, the repositioning of the conflicts would alter the contrapuntal effects in each new structure or performance. That playful recombining again underscores his counterpoint vision even as it vents the anger. "Interrupted Rhythms"

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Although The Shit-Storm Poems displayed considerable variety in tone and poetic forms, response to the work tended to focus on the angry poems and the loud voices. Ironically, the soft-spoken poet was suddenly greeted with headlines like "Poet Martin Storms Campus" (The Commuter Newspaper, 1975). While Martin's poetry up to this time had exhibited quiet strength and determination, the publication of The Shit Storm-Poems created expectations in his audience that he would "use his art as a vehicle for social commentary or militant propaganda" ("Herbert Martin Reads Poetry," The Commuter Newspaper, 1975). Of course his poems from the beginning had exhibited social commentary, and now The Shit-Storm Poems included several angry poems. But again, the poems and performances could not be compartmentalized. Reviewers noted that audiences were "mesmerized" and "revitalized" in the "gut life" of his work and in the sense that "hundreds of years of history and knowledge are there to verify his illustrations." In spite of the militancy of his reporting on Cleaver's and Wright's shit storms, audiences would still read and hear the contrapuntal balance and collisions that became his hallmarks. One reviewer concluded that Martin's "sense of rhythm and his mastery of words satisfies the ear" in an appeal that is universal ("Herbert Martin Reads Poetry," The Commuter Newspaper, 1975). Martin kept the clarity of his counterpoint alive by expanding his already large repertoire to include even more musical forms and other elements of the African American oral tradition. As one commentator on the times suggests, once the narrowest propaganda attacks were out of the way or once the anger that needed to be vented was released, there emerged among black poets of the early seventies"celebrants of a newborn cultural identity" (Bigsby, Second Black Renaissance 301). Ofcourse this wasn't new at all, and what Bigsby sees in the song and dialogue of black poets in the early seventies had been there for a long time in the spirituals, the slave songs, and the poetry of James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, among others. For Martin-and for many black poets of the time who were planted firmly in the oral traditionit was not a question of getting anything "out of the way" but of incorporating into a complex hybrid artistry the elements of tradition that were always there. Bigsby concludes that energy, confidence, and "a commitment to the notion of art as a liberating force" placed the new black poets "at the heart of the cultural reawakening which was the Second Black Renaissance" (301). Stephen Henderson has explored the ingredients of what many people were calling at the time a Second Black Renaissance. Beginning with the view that black poetry had been misunderstood, misinterpreted, and undervalued, Henderson addresses elements of the oral tradition and the black experience that he feels require renewed attention. He touches on most of 72

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the genres that Martin was absorbing and incorporating into his performances and published poems: slave songs, work songs, jazz and the blues, the sermons, spirituals, and what Henderson calls "virtuoso naming and enumerating" and "worrying the line." Using a poem as a "score" or "chart" to be performed, with considerable improvisation. Martin's counterpoint art creates what Henderson calls "saturation" or fidelity to the observed and intuited truth of the black experience (Understanding 62-69). Martin was attracted at this time as well to a similarly concentrated experience in the life of Nat Love, one of many long overlooked black cowboys. He began his research for "The Deadwood Dick Poems" while teaching at Aquinas College from 1969 to 1970. He had accepted a new job in Dayton and was planning a ceremonial transition: "To mark my going and coming, I thought it would be a fine gesture to give a farewell reading with a new long poem" ("How the Deadwood Dick Poems Came Into Being" 291). He was attracted to what was for him a new territory by Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones in the Adventures of the Negro Cowboys. In chapter 14, Deadwood Dick especially caught his eye. Nat Love attracted him as well because Nathaniel was one of Martin's father's given names and because Nat succeeded when the odds were against him. Martin saved all his drafts of the Deadwood Dick sequence, and we can trace the changes he made and at least speculate on why he made those choices. Basically he wrote without trying to follow an outline and with a minimum of initial revision: "I wanted Deadwood Dick to talk until he was tired of telling me what he wanted me to know, and tired of telling me what I was too inquisitive about. When he seemed exhausted, I would pose another question, and he would begin his monologue all over again" (Writing Room 292). If this echoes Mark Twain remembering how his character Pudd'nhead Wilson got way out of his control and started saying things he did not want him to, there is a similar enthusiasm and dedication to the research methods. "What I wanted most was not to interrupt this figure with my own perceptions," Martin recalls about his habit of taking dictation from 11 P.M. until the early morning: "I did not want to interfere; I wanted to act as a recording device for Nathaniel Love's story" (292). Though aware of his obligation to select and shape material, he heeded Ezra Pound's advice that poets always need to know as much as possible about a subject, even when a detail seems unnecessary at the time. He extends the metaphor of the uninterrupted recorder one more step: "What I wanted to create was a sense of this character being stopped for a photographer's session. My eyes were the lenses; I wanted to capture as near a likeness as possible. As this session begins, the questions also begin, and so in effect the poem has its beginning" (295). "Interrupted Rhythms"

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Deciding how to begin a poem sets the direction for structure, character development, and theme. Herbert W. Martin as roving reporter, soaking up unfiltered what Nat Love pours out, creates an immediacy that keeps "The Deadwood Dick Poems" crisp and vibrant. In successive revisions Martin mostly eliminated what he found to be an overabundance of words, and he shaped a new hybrid form indebted to two related genres: the slave narrative and the dime novel. In locating the history of African American cowboys in their quest for freedom, a pattern of suffering and escape emerges. While the cowboy or outlaw replaces the slave as the main character and the "promised land" becomes the open plains, for the audience of the dime novel, characterization and action prompt a similar "interest" or "sympathy." Long ago, James D. Hart focused on the appeal of the "heroic deeds" portrayed in the dime novel that were "denied to readers who had to conform to anonymous urban life and the confining efficiency of a mechanized age." The dime novel was, then-like the slave narrative in a different context-what Hart calls "literature of escape from the machine age." But while the slave narrative concentrates on escape from a life of bondage rather than from all problems, the hyperbole of the dime novel often prompts withdrawal from ordinary experiential difficulties that the superhuman hero never had to face. In short, the dime novel became, as Hart proposes, a substitute for the broken promises of reality. Exaggeration thus became the rule on "the pure open stretches of God's country" where the heroes were often "established American deities" (PopularBook 153-55). The slave narrative and the dime novel may be considered similar species of revolutionary literature, each answering the needs of their different readership in the same way. The note of revolution is especially clear in the characterizations of Deadwood Dick, whose "concern with social problems" isin the view of Henry Nash Smith-"unique in the dime novels" (112). Putting it another way and in another context, Merle Curti some time ago identified a major theme of the dime novel as "emancipation of the rank and file from the grinding overlordship of feudal masters." In this view the concern of the slave narrative for the freedom of the individual slave parallels the view in the dime novel that the American Revolution "freed new human energies previously confined by an entrenched aristocracy" ("Dime Novels" 763-65). Combining historical accounts and the legends that dime novels propagated with the passion of the slave narrative, Martin explores the quests of Nat Love, "James Thomas Crow, dude, singer, actor et al.," who "went riding West / in search of history." In the Deadwood Dick poems he captures the expanse of the plains, the adventure of new settlement, and the freedom of equality in the face of the elements. Further, through the use of a conversa74

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tional interchange between Nat and a poet-persona, he transforms the fantasizing characteristics in many of the legendary accounts of Deadwood Dick into a facing of the difficulties typically recorded in the slave narrative. His source is the account of Nat Love recorded by Durham and Jones in TheNegro Cowboys. Nat's story is not one of Edward L. Wheeler's original Deadwood Dick tales; in fact, it is not even strictly speaking a dime novel at all. The first work of Wheeler that is usually considered a dime novel, DeadwoodDick, the Prince ofthe Road, or TheBlackRuderofthe BlackHills, was pu blished in 1877, and his hero was not a black man. But long after Wheeler's death there appeared (in 1907) The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the CattleCountryas "DeadwoodDick"-by Himself. The autobiography of a black cowboy, the tale was subtitled "A True History of Slave Days, Life on the Great Cattle Ranges and on the Plains of the 'Wild and Wooly' West, Based on Facts, and Personal Experiences of the Author." Martin's "facts" in "The Deadwood Dick Poems" are based, therefore, on Durham's and Jones's discussion of a book that was neither a dime novel nor a slave narrative, but a story that shared elements of both. While Nat Love's adventures historically lacked external verification, the narrative presents counterpoint elements of Nat's experiences. Born into a Tennessee slave family in 1854, Nat gained freedom at Emancipation, after which he cared for his family until they could survive the death of his father and make it on their own. Beginning with his first job breaking colts, Nat's history is preserved by Martin from Durham's and Jones's accounts. Examination of these events helps explain Martin's sources and the distinctive ways in which he blends the two genres. Using the heroic exaggeration of the dime novel tradition as leverage, Martin's poet-persona stresses the creative toughness and liberating restraints of nature's hardness. In manipulating the legends reflected in Nat Love's tales, Martin undercuts heroic hyperbole in order to emphasize the creative dimension of confronting the difficulties of everyday experience. He thus establishes narrative and thematic patterns that approximate those of the slave narrative. As Nat moved from Tennessee through Missouri and Kansas to Texas, his quest represents suffering and endurance, escape from an initiation into the trials of geography and climate. Durham and Jones identify major modifications in the "Deadwood Dick" legends: During those first few months with a cattle outfit, Nat learned that the work pushed a man to the limit of his endurance. He rode through hailstorms so violent that they would have discouraged a weaker man.... But after a series of trials he had so adapted himself to life in the cattle "Interrupted Rhythms"

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country that he could cope with any of these adversities.... He learned the value and satisfaction that came with companionship and he noted that with the earth for a bed and the sky for a covering all men were more or less the same. (195) Thus, at the end of a type of initiation rite, Nat was named "Deadwood Dick." Even after the 1880s, when he "traded his cowpony for an iron horse," Nat described the meaning of his experiences in his memoirs: Such was the life on the western ranges when I rode them, and such were my comrades and surroundings; humor and tragedy. In the midst of life we were in death, but above all shone the universal manhood. The wild and free life. The boundless plains. The countless thousands of long horn steers, the wild fleet footed mustangs. The buffalo and other game, the Indians, the delight of living, and the fights against death that caused every nerve to tingle, and the everyday communion with men, whose minds were as broad as the plains they roamed, and whose creed was every man for himself, and every friend for each other, and with each other till the end. (204-5) Martin's poem is a dedication to a public quest-a self conscious exploration undertaken by the poet in his reworking of history: Between the spaces Deadwood Dick I vision you, man Image within the pupils Struggling somewhere in mid-life against the stampede Odds of Texas, Arizona, Nebraska Horses and other men.' Thus the poet stands on the plains of vision acting out through struggle an initiation rite: "I have found it necessary to walk through your blood" (I: 10). Once this pattern of quest and struggle is set, the next five poems review Nat's experiences: Early your father died. He made you man at twelve Through death, through the discipline Of breaking colts for 10¢ apiece. (II: 1-4) 76

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Nat's pursuit of "the free" is disciplined through a process once again suggesting the narrative counterpart of the slave narrative: That animal-will which First introduced you to stampede; The rough paths and pasture; That throttled you almost to the ground Taught your arteries tenacity. (II: 9-13) This theme of development through response to the environment is embodied in poem III in the metaphor of land as self-discipline: "You, Deadwood, master of rope and gun, / When the wind interrupts your sleep / The ground, I know, in that instance is harder" (III: 1-3). Loneliness prevails as the mind moves, in an echo of Richard Wright, "between you and your dream" (III: 8). The poet-persona thus addresses Nat in the midwestern imagery of contraries: dust storms of the herd, hail storms and ice, teaching that "a man can shoot everything but nature" (III: 17). For Nat Love, nature was the strongest of midwestern external liberating disciplines-prompting the poet-persona to ask ironically in an inversion of mythic heroics: "Was the open as free as history records?" (III: 23). Here the hardness of nature, death, loneliness, and pain coalesce as nature's discipline calls for Nat's response. The poet-persona challenges Nat to admit that his quest is difficult. To this end he taunts the hero ("You, man, were rough," IV: 2) and plays with the assumptions of dime novel accounts in his questioning: "What I want to ask is how ... no, why? / After so many years of riding / You never recorded a single soft encounter?" (IV: 5-7). In his ironic commentary on Nat's quest, the poet-persona argues that such generally accepted hyperbole obscures the toughness of everyday ordinary difficulties. In poems V and VII, especially, the commentary on Nat's experience becomes explicit: Deadwood, these are thoughts I put to you, ultimately, Because I wish I could ride a black horse into history ... I should like to ride out Into the gallery of the world. (V: 1-2, 10-11) In poem V the poet-persona's request is the counterpart of Nat's search for freedom as he desires to make the journey himself. In terms of the sustained metaphor of the land and the imagery of changing seasons, the quest culminates for Nat and the poet-persona in poem VII: "Interrupted Rhythms"

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In Tennessee you hunted rabbits. In Texas you learned men shoot men. Deadwood Dick Yours is a metaphor to exhaust. The earth is not mother enough. This earth this mother She Carnivorous devours us whole when we die We grow wise for that. (1-9) The narrative and thematic pattern thus reinforces the toughness of the land that devours and instructs. Similarly, the poet-persona focuses once more on the dangers of hyperbole ("Where did you bury the knowledge of your dark enemies?" VIII: 11) and the dreams that keep a man going in the midst of difficulties: "Do not let me invade your personal dreams: / They are the things which save us from bullets, / Snakes, mean, and other dangers" (IX: 5-8). Setting up a tension between the fantastic tales Nat records and the realism inferred by history, the speaker gathers together the quest and the metaphor of land as discipline: "You can lookinto the hands of a man ninety / And seethe placeshe has traveled" (IX: 15-16). Quests for new experience and recorded past experience thus merge in a calm crystallizing scene: Sunday night. Deadwood, The roads are deserted. We discuss ourselves. (X: 10-13) In a further expansion of the metaphor of the land and a distinctively counterpointed juxtaposition of disparate elements, Nat and the poet-persona find answers to their search: Carefully, Nat Love was overheard to say: "Man, imagine you come beating your ass out here on a horse's back talkin' 'bout questin' for some kind of history or 'nother, well, I don't rightly know much about where it is but it's out here 78

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somewhere, I guess in the blood of the people in the water of the land between the length of life inhale and exhale which reminds me speaking of life 'cause I ain't much on death 'though don't get me wrong I done seen a lot of men die a heap more put away life is something else! I got an opinion there, now ... If you would keep the soul, the flesh must suffer. (XI: 4-27) A double irony is at work in Nat's answer to the poet-persona's questions. In a more direct, matter-of-fact manner, Nat too enacts a historical pattern of search and growth through suffering. In a sense, he summarizes the concerns of the entire narrative sequence in answering the ironic challenges to the humanity of his legendary heroics. Starting out with nothing, facing the wide expanse of the plains, creating dreams in the open air, disciplined by storms and ice, Nat experiences events that become a "frozen photograph," crystallized and at the same time liberated through a metaphor of inexhaustible contraries. It remains then in poem XII to reaffirm the risk of the quest, the difficulties of growth, and the potential for failure: "Indians come in silence, the buffalo comes with noise. / It is with such swiftness the most destruction occurs" (XII: 6-7). The bittersweet complexities of Nat Love's struggles on the plains once again illustrate the interplay of contraries in Martin's narrative and lyrical poems. "The Deadwood Dick Poems" are a link as well between his earlier contrapuntal poems and his increasing interest in re-creating historical truths through reenacting dialogue. Selected Deadwood Dick poems had appeared as early as 1971 (in the Midwest Quarterly and in Rap) and in 1972 in 10 Michigan Poets and in The Shit-Storm Poems (1973). Over the next three decades his research on the middle passage would lead to further historically based narrative poems, operas, and oratorios. Fallout over what many considered unsavory about Martin's title continued until the publication of the next book in 1976. His mother was embarrassed by the title, and reportedly Robert Hayden would not endorse The "Interrupted Rhythms"

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Shit-Storm Poems on the book jacket, though he greatly admired the poems themselves. Martin noted that much misunderstanding about the title could have been averted with closer attention to the spiritual "Been in the Storm So Long." In between books, Martin continued to expand his participation in a variety of art forms. As poet-in-residence at the University of Dayton, he was beginning to stage his one-man show featuring the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar. He also continued to appear in plays such as Dry Thunder; The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd; and My Country Is Good. More of his poems were anthologized in The Poetryof BlackAmerica, An Anthologyof BlackPoets, and 10 MichiganPoets-collections that showcased his range. "If I Should Speak of Love" considers the proposition that two parallel lives will meet at some imaginary point where we "engage ourselves / In love" (10 MichiganPoets 107). "The Nun at the General Motors Building" exhorts "Lady in your habit of prayer, pray on." The paradox is that "the generous poor who pause / Render a coin, receive a smile." The speaker concludes, "0 Lady, Lady, what an obscure bird / Christ is" (107). Other poems include an additional contrapuntal, a new Antigone poem, and several quiet pieces that foreshadow his later work in TheForms ofSilence and Galileo 'sSuns. Nearly a decade after his Les Deux Megots days, he returned also to the lessons of the coffeehouse poetry to have some fun with poetic word games and lists. In "The Deodorants," for example, "Yodora, Mitchum, Tussy and Brut / Thought it best to keep their Secret / Soft and dri." Jazz rhythms and a bit of counterpoint merge in this satire on television ads: So sprinkle it pad it powder it paste it dab it spray it We Ultra Ban it. For five continuous days. In the future, They said with assurance We will Dial you; Do not call us. (Primeau, Rhetoric 137) Not content to send up the deodorants alone, Martin next took on soap operas in one of his earliest magnet poems: "The doctors whose love of life / Slapped all my children into / The days of our lives; / that is all you can expect at / The general hospital. / You must achieve elsewhere / A biblical sense of / The guiding light / And learn carefully / How to survive a marriage / Because you have but one life to live" (Primeau, Rhetoric 188). Martin

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sent a copy of "The Soaps" to the Today show and-although they didn't use it-Jane Pauley responded in a letter: "I wanted to tell you that I had read it on the air but there wasn't time. You got them all in" (HWMP). Characteristically, Martin would use "The Deodorants" and "The Soaps" nearly twenty years later in his opera libretto for It Paysto Advertise. Throughout the decade Martin continued to plan a collection of tributes to Ezra Pound, acknowledged by many to be the most influential and controversial poet in the modern era. His admiration for Pound extends back to his undergraduate days, and Pound's insistence on clean, crisp images. Martin was drawn to Pound's economy of words and his insistence that poets follow "the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome" ("A Retrospect"). Predictably, the contrast and paradoxes in Pound's writings and his life attracted Martin's own contrapuntal ways of creating through collision and combination. In May 1971, Martin visited Pound in Venice. His journal entry for May 27, 1971, records his lengthy search through the city with a near miss in Pound's favorite restaurant and his eventual meeting with the poet who stands "with Stravinsky and Picasso as great makers of the Twentieth century" (HWMP). Pound was gracious in receiving Martin: "Pound sat quietly on a couch by the stairs, almost too attentively. Light filtered in through the window at his left as I rattled on with his secretarycompanion Olga Rudge." He was impressed by Pound's brilliance and tact, though mostly he was silent: "After all, he has said what he had to say, and the wisest of men know when to keep silent.... What need was there for him to rehash old ideas?" Martin left "exalted" and later sent Pound a copy of "Homage to Ezra Pound," which he had written in the late 1950S and published in Descant in 1967. "From the crown of his granite mind, new pronounced / Unstable, grow thinning hairs grey and black," Martin begins, and his tribute pours out to "the face of a poet-man in sculptured agony." With eyes "mockingly grave and a forehead withered to the skull," the man becomes a shadow in the Pisan sun. He hoped Olga would read his poem to Pound and that it might express "a measure of gratitude for his having lived so exciting and full a life.'? The pardoxes of Martin's admiration for this controversial figure are matched only by its logic. In 1970, one year before his pilgrimage to Venice, The Lifeof Ezra Pound was published. The author, Noel Stock, was a University of Toledo professor and influential mentor for Martin. Hugh Kenner's The PoundEra appeared in 1971, the year of the University of Toledo Conference on Modernism where Martin had spoken up from the floor about several panelists' being out of touch with the hopes and aspirations of young writers. From his poetry tribute of

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the 1950Sthrough the Les Deux Megots days and into the beginning of his own teaching career, Martin saw Pound as a major force of innovation and clarity for young poets. He admired Pound's "three propositions (demanding direct treatment, economy of words, and the sequence of the musical phrase" ("A Retrospect") and praised him as "the best maker." For Martin, Pound not only cleaned the poetic tools and uncluttered the channels of perception-he also encouraged and energized his ongoing commitment to multiple points of view, media, and musical nuances. When Pound died in the fall of 1972, Martin was on his way to California for a poetry reading. Just eighteen months after his visit to Venice, he began to plan an ambitious project destined to be controversial. Fresh from the Dunbar Centennial Celebration in Dayton, he collected a wide array of tributes to "the most controversial and influential poet of the twentieth century." The "influential" part was born out by the enthusiastic response of potential contributors over the next few years; the "controversial" dimensions continue to forestall the publication of what he had compiled under the title EzraPound:A Reminiscence (manuscript in HWMP). Martin's "Preface" is one of several tributes he has written, and the volume was to include more than 120 contributions. Because of Pound's broadcasts for Mussolini, his alleged anti-Semitism, and other controversies, securing permissions was at times a lengthy and difficult process. Elizabeth Bishop, for example, voiced her displeasure to Martin but did release her "Visits to St. Elizabeth's"-whereas T. S. Eliot's "widow declined permission, citing Pound's politics" (HWMP). The unpublished collection includes old and new poems from many, including Robert Frost, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Ginsberg, James Laughlin (who also wrote the introduction), Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway. He also included the New York Times Announcement of Memorial Services, which concluded that Pound's influence was so extensive that no history of literature in our times could be written without considering his force. The creation of EzraPound:A Reminiscence is likely to remain one of those important processes where a product is never fully accepted. It remains in Martin's legacy of orchestrating activities-extending back to his undergraduate promotion of William Warfield's visit with his writing group at the University of Toledo through the Dunbar Centennial and ahead to the Emily Dickinson Celebration yet to come in the 1980s in Dayton (see chapter 6). His own poems owe a debt to Pound's directives about economy, precision, and music of language-and he wrote one more tribute to the poet who created a "vast line" that extracted "gems from putrid bones" as he "dared to attack the agony of our rhythms and the passions of our per82

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sonal sounds." Martin let some time go by so that "by now the Venetian waters have begun to rob your coffin." Yet "your memory hangs like authentic mist over St. Mark's, distinct in feel yet invisible in form and smell." The legacy, the controversy, the mystery will endure: "Tell me, what dreams are those to be found in the silence ofwater?" ("Remembering Ezra Pound," HWMP). Martin's third collection of poems, ThePersistence of the Flesh (1976), is a meditation on loneliness and the difficulty of establishing relationships. The title is from James Baldwin's use of the biblical prophecy of the bridegroom who wants to greet those who soar beyond "the persistence of the flesh" to where death loses its power: "Then, in that moment, each of them might have mounted with wings like eagles far past the sordid persistence of the flesh, the depthless iniquity of the heart, the doom of hours and days and weeks; to be received by the bridegroom where he waited on high in glory; where all tears were wiped away and death had no power; where the wicked ceased from troubling and the weary soul found rest" (Martin, quoting Baldwin, 9). In such concentration of interrupted rhythms, the poems in this collection are alternately despairing and hopeful broodings, relentless urges to break out of entrapments of all kinds. Through its counterpoint of prayers and mad songs and its moving, quiet images, Persistence shows how interrupted rhythms can often be more powerful than fine melodies. The plot of this volume is suspenseful. Thirteen "Prayers" begin a meditation on the battles between spirit and flesh, "Sanctuary," and immersion in difficulties. The Prayersare glimpses of eternity cut off by the intrusiveness of a phenomenal existence. The question becomes the long-running problem of dualism: escape versus process. Process wins but has its price. Along the way the motifs of the quest are desire, quiet, memory, the separation and reunion of the elements, and images of the land. The wind and poet's song breathe new life into a losing battle called dying. There's a breakthrough, a triumph, and-like his "young woman leaning against her man"the poet "watches / and / laughs loudly against the afternoon traffic" (12). The prayers set the tone of the struggle. Breath and blood wrestle with death, looking for the "soul's salvation," dreaming. The problem is urgent: the soul cannot rest because blood and spirit can never get together. It is a doomed quester-more Childe Roland than Ulysses-who must "do battle everyday." In the Prayers, the flesh is a prison and the spirit is "refuge." The energy seems to be "desire," memory is painful, and the plea is for deliverance. Yet "Prayer XIII" refuses to deny the "restless soul ... silent as wild things" (23). These struggles continue long after the poet rises from prayer. There are broken pieces everywhere, wasteland images: a farmer "fifty years "Interrupted Rhythms"

into his dying," bodies "closer and closer to the grave," breakings of "tenuous sound," "defective" spaces between "the spoken word of hearing," the ripping of flesh, and even waters that "tear apart" a Vietnamese mother and child-dead in a last embrace ("A Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary" 60). There are also painful desires, silence and loneliness-outgrowths of the dualism. Desires become old memories and unrewarded "dreams." In short: "half the world I've seen / Has this terrible need, this long desire." The silence is often agony, a "dealing / from a deck of solitaire" ("In My Mad Country's Mind" 62). But there is also an overwhelming motif of "Quiet" in these poems. Martin uses dramatic silence the way Harold Pinter uses the pause. Quiet is an energizer, a time when people "know what it means to be." The quest is for "Quiet, Sanctuary, / From this world's rush." Ice falls "quietly"; intruders step"quietly" on the"dreams of old men"; lovers touch"quietly"; light falls "quietly" from a window; the "silence" of the night is love, and light becomes the intruder. In the end it is "quiet" that conquers the dualism, bringing breath and spirit, wind and rain, land and seed into an irreducible but painful unity held fast by memory. Images of breath persist yet evolve in the poems. Early, in "Prayer VIII," words evaporate as they are breathed into praying hands (Persistence 18). Then the breath makes music to "catch the rhythm" of the pulse (21). The spirit-flesh opposition is also sacramental when "I take deliberate refuge in Your spirit; / I exalt as I take you in." Breath is synonymous with Spirit itself in the poems, and yet later breath is also the poet's song and the lovers' triumphant bruising of the night in each others' arms. Alongside the emphasis on breath, Martin also shapes an Emersonian lesson as the elements themselves break through dualism to a vision of wholeness. The wind and the rain are lovers who "celebrate their marriage" (32). The wind also unites memory and the cherry blossoms, petals and thorns. The wind brings "the challenge of love." The rain perforates air and ground into a unity. Rivers course like blood and "break gently through the earth" to mix with the wind which is breath and spirit. Like Whitman's rocking cradle, Martin's maiden waits serenely on the shore for the meeting of the land and water, breath and flesh that is new creation. The resolution at once is strong and painful. The resolution is complete only when it is painful. The greatest triumph also reintroduces the heartaches all over again: "It aches to rise and become my skin / follicle and hair frightened. / Oh the rush of love is pain" (55). That, the poem says, is what it means to persist. The achieved union of elements is as strong in these poems as their dualistic struggle. The poems seem to say that the tension must persist. Memory 84

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emerges as the only accurate record of the ongoing struggle as well as the peace. These poems are, in the end, oral art. In the Prayers, memory is a half-hearted and painful celebration. About losses and unfulfilled unions, memory is "strict." A church houses a "room of memory," gathering cobwebs. Often the quest is to touch the memory, which itself remains a fragile part of the tension. These interrupted rhythms are an engrossing collection of battles between flesh and soul, desire and sanctuary, process and rescue, wind and rain. The triumphs quietly break through in breath and the poet's song, a union that is a "new beauty" yet also a persistence. There is a steady growth in Martin's first three books of poems. Always a controlled lyrical voice, he ventured in his second book through and then beyond celebration into a storm of mythical quest, anger, and teeth-gritting acceptance. In his third volume, interrupted rhythms have gathered new strength, words take on new meanings, and the motifs become enlarged and enriched in each reading. His sense of origins and subtle variance in word usage will intrigue anyone with the least interest in etymology. The images never stand still. Martin wrote ThePersistence ofthe Flesh while he was working on his tribute to Pound. That imagistic influence was prominent at this time, as may be seen in "Six Variations on the Theme of Rain": "Rain / lengthy / falls / long / as worms. / The / rain / worms / its / way / through / air and / earth" (29). In his review of the book, poet Alvin Aubert draws our attention to "the quietly coordinated forces figuratively embodied in the natural images of sun, wind and rain, which convey a sense of joy yet a plaintiveness."3 Aubert emphasizes patterns of "paradoxical imagistic interplay," which create disharmony as well as "fugitive elements" in the speaker's "psycho physical" makeup. "Two kinds of singing go on in the poems," Aubert notes, one that is modeled on traditional musical and poetic forms and the other that is a "more asserted singing" akin to the kinetic mode of Billie Holiday-a tonal vibration drawing on high pitch as well as silences. That kind of singing includes "the interstices as well as the filled spaces, as in successful Zen poetry." As in his earlier volumes, The Persistence of the Flesh includes more Antigone poems, a sonnet ("To explain the sonnet is difficult: / Watch how a bird flies easefully; exalt"-"Sonnet: Watch How a Bird Flies" 59), and several museum pieces celebrating Botticelli, Michaelangelo, and Miro, who "teaches his pupils all he knows ... where everything is possible ... where you can walk upright or upside down." At the museum if we look very carefully we can find "The universe we inhabit / before we are born" ("You Shall Skip through This Museum: Life" 51). Aubert directs us to "Lines," which carries Dudley Randall's exhortation that modified Pound's "Hugh Selwyn "Interrupted Rhythms"

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Mauberly" ("The age / requires this task / create / a different image; reanimate / the mask"). Aubert notes how Martin rejects the "Myopically conceived role of the poet posited in certain quarters for African Americans" (HWMP). For the end, he preempts the advice of his speaker in "For My Mad Country and Mind": "I turn words into / books, / Investigate pain in the hair's end, / Wonder where I am going, where I've been. / And you / My friend / Who tells me, / 'Make poems out of every necessity' / Do not know what agony / What misery by water that imperative demands." That agony is explored tersely in Martin's most frequently anthologized poem, "A Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary." A pivotal work in his development, it was one of Martin's first uses of the diary format which he developed so much more fully later in The Logof the Vigilante (1976, 2000). The diary explores the brutal events a black soldier encountered in his tour in Vietnam. Martin uses the chronicling of the diarist to capture the bluntness of experience and the irony of all attempts to make sense out of brutality and contradictions. When he discovers the dead bodies of a mother and child in a river, the soldier writes that "they had been there a month; the water had begun to tear them apart." Even in death, he notes, the mother had not relinquished her hug. Lowering his gun, he walks away with a stomach that screams of confusion and guilt that he can't leave behind: "Bullets here kill with the same deliberate speed they do at home," he notes. "Do not celebrate me when and if I come home" (60). Fear, guilt, and caution dominate the soldier's diary in entries meant to be juxtaposed with matter-of-fact news reports or political arguments. Through the soldier's own story, Martin constructs an account of the war's daily events that must be heard alongside all official accounts. "I step around the smallest creatures these days," he records. "I am cautious to pray." Rethinking his own contributions to the atrocities he confronts, this soldier seeks understanding and a community of sharing: "I am cautious to believe the day will come when we can / Take up our sharing again with deliberate speed." The war is for him a disruption of that sharing; it is a time when killing destroys the community of human beings he prays can be rebuilt. In bitter ironic tones, he concludes with a challenge to readers who might find and read his diary: "Have you prayed, lately, for that?" (60). In "The Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary" Martin brings the polarizations and interrupted rhythms of TheShit-StormPoems full circle." Shortly after the poem was written, poet Roy Scheele wrote in a letter to Martin that it was one of the truest poems to emerge from the war: "It represents the human side of things, the helplessness and longing to be whole again, outside 'the deliberate speed' of death in war as truly and effectively as Bly's 'Country Small86

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Boned Bodies' represents the dehumanization and mechanization of the same thing." Scheele further underscores "the sadness that sings in the crevices" of the soldier's diary. What emerges from the diary is "a human being, a black man, in whose voice I am made to realize what it is to be black here and over there" (letter to Martin, December 6, 1969, HWMP). To create that voice, Martin drew upon his study of history and literary forms, his experimentation with stage dialogues as a playwright and actor, his diverse performing skills as a singer and coffeehouse poet, and his invention of the contrapuntal poem. With "A Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary," Scheele assures Martin, "You've entered into the deep, true areas of your work ... an early fulfillment of that new thing I felt coming into those poems you sent me from Vermont last summer. This is that other music of the voice that will make a real book someday" (HWMP). The Vietnam "flashpoint" poem helped to make ThePersistence ofthe Flesh plaintive, ironically joyful, and real.

"Interrupted Rhythms"

· 5· EmpoweringAudiences A Vision of Community in My Mother's Voice andFinalW

In October 1996 the Ohio Humanities Council gave Martin a lifetime achievement award for "outstanding contributions to the public knowledge and appreciation of the humanities" ("Herbert Woodward Martin to Receive" 7). The Bjornson Award for Distinguished Service in the Humanities recognized his sharing "the power of the humanities with a large and diverse public." The award not only affirms service to the community but recognizes as well his ability to negotiate along the borders of what for many is a deep division between elitist and popular art. Poetry constructs and preserves the history we live. The poet in performance forges a partnership with the audience; together they enact and interpret stories about where we have been and who we are. As a teacher, publishing poet, and performer of the word, in the midseventies Martin raised questions about who gets to tell the stories, who is listening, and who interprets the poems and absorbs their meaning into the communities where people live and work. His performances expanded audiences in two ways: his one-man show "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Eyes of the Poet" brought in new people and brought back people who had forgotten how much they actually did like poetry in performance. At the same time, Dunbar's works and Martin's own poems gave voice to characters not often allowed to speak for themselves. As growing audiences became acquainted with characters too long ignored, Martin's performances reinvested in the power of people to define their own aspirations and values through what they considered to be "popular." In partnership with Dunbar and out on his own, Martin created communities of listeners who expressed themselves through their enjoyment of his work.

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Roland Barthes has distinguished between "readerly" and "writerly" texts. A readerly text is user-friendly, is easy to understand on a simple reading, and makes few demands on an audience. The reader is receptive, almost passive, and simply "gets" what is being said as if the meaning were already in the text in a reasonably accessible way. Recipes, well-written operation manuals, and straightforward, hard-sell advertisements tend to be "readerly." Not very many poems are readerly, perhaps because we think anything too simple cannot be poetic. Passive reading seems to diminish artistic worth, as if practical functioning objects that do not require analysis cannot be aesthetic. Maybe where there is a minimum of complexity, there can be a readerly poem. Perhaps Martin's "I don't wanta fuck your mama" or "we need each other to see" (from TheShit-StormPoems quoted earlier) would have the kind of directiveness-shocking or reassuring-that would enable readers to come away feeling what you see or hear is what you get. Or maybe a simple picture close to the reader's everyday experience and complicated with analytical nuance could be undermining in that sense, yet also moving. "There is an old man walking alone," Martin begins "Poem" with Wordsworthian rustic simplicity. "He sees something invisible, distinctly beside him / He dismisses it with a wave of the hand, / With words I cannot overhear" (Persistence 26). The invisibility, the dismissal, and the words that cannot be heard might invite readers to go beyond what they are simply getting in the text, but the conclusion brings this back to being straightforward, passive, user-friendly (except maybe in a class where there is going to be a test) and therefore readerly: "He turns the corner into another way. / The wind and sun go with him; / His age is enough to command" (26). That last line might be, in Barthes's terms, the readerly clincher so that the text is full, clear, gently allusive enough to be poetic, but undemanding enough to be readerly. A writerly text, on the other hand, is for Barthes often ambiguous, openended, and apparently difficult-at least until one learns the rules or conventions of reading. Most people immediately think that poetry is writerly because by its nature it is supposed to be a challenge rewarding at least in part because we can practice the complex maneuvers we learn as interpretive readers. Writerly texts, according to Barthes, challenge readers to rewrite what they are reading as they go along in order to make sense out of it. To invite this and to guide readers along the way, a writerly text will draw attention to its own textual constructedness. In the simplest way, the places of difficulty will be marked with road signs inviting participation and come with some guide books detailing what kind of participation is or

EmpoweringAudiences

is not of most value. In its heightened state of self-reflexivity, a writerly text will draw attention to itself as a film might remind us it is a film (highly visible technical effects, actors stepping out of character and talking to a camera) or as a poem that has as its subject being a poem. In any case, a writerly text invites or demands readers to participate in the construction of the meaning as they read along rather than assume the meaning is already in the text waiting to be ingested whole. Of course many of Martin's poems on the page and on the stage are writerly. His Antigone sequence beginning in New York the NineMillion and OtherPoems is allusive and open-ended, and readers who know the classical allusions are invited to emphasize the constructedness of the text and at least in part create the meaning of the poem by following certain conventions. "The Deadwood Dick Poems" foreground a reader in the text so that we are invited and demanded to respond to questions asked or to be an arbiter during the debates between Nat Love and the narrator. In "Sestina: Lines to an Unknown Suicide," the lines "They took you away; now, no one has access / To you. Do you wander like the light of a star / Infinitely down the sky space's only corridor" (TheForms ofSilence 29) require that the reader first knows what a sestina is. Often a "writerly" poem will reveal layers of complexity that require readers to work their way through several times before they can construct anything satisfying to them. Consider: "Charity, repent / pusillanimous strength / are the musts / to instigate rapture / which led to the / inevitable carnage of Carthage" ("Sassy Music," in Galileo's Suns 25). The point here is not to increase the difficulty (which is always relative) or to enumerate types of ambiguity but to remind readers that they are reading a constructed object, that its constructedness is not complete until they participate in it, and that it probably can make sense in different ways depending in part on how they follow the rules of the genre and do their own readerly activity well. John Fiske feels we need a third type-the "producerly text"-that is essentially a popularized writerly text. By popular, Fiske does not mean just that something sells or that it is easy for mass readers or that it is a creator's intent to pacify "cultural dopes." In his many studies on the topic, Fiske defines something as popular when it is an expression through which the people define and explore their deepest values and beliefs. Popular culture for Fiske is not consumption but rather "the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system" (Understanding PopularCulture 23). Popular poetry is defined and measured, then, not simply in terms of buying and selling texts. Poetry is not "homogeneous, mass produced" texts to be "consumed," and audiences do not "behave or 90

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live like the masses, an aggregation of alienated, one-dimensional persons whose only consciousness is false, whose only relationship to the system that enslaves them is one of unwitting (if not willing) dupes" (23-24). Popular poetry is created by the people as an expression of themselves. Poets produce a "repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing the popular culture" (24). In these terms, Martin has created simple, undemanding readerly texts as well as demanding ("sophisticated") writerly texts that subtly impress or dazzle with panache. But he has also written and performed a very large number of popular poems that have expanded the numbers in his audience and enlarged the activities that audiences are asked to perform-and so participate in the producing-while listening or reading. Fiske's suggestion that we need a third term-"producerly"-provides considerable insight on how Martin's contrapuntal imagination has empowered new audiences to take on what are for them new roles. A "producerly text," according to Fiske, is not especially difficult to understand or demanding of the reader-listener for it to make sense. More than in response to a readerly text, though, audiences may feel the desire to fill in meanings or to put themselves into what seems to call for closure. That invitation to closure feels, however, like an undemanding coaxing rather than a requirement. Further, the invitation that the producerly text extends to the reader to complete the meaning does not come equipped with its own rules for how to behave as a reader. It does not deliver laws of its own construction. As a result, a producerly text will often seem to be a readerly text masquerading as a writerly text. But the producerly text neither requires participation nor sets rules to control the way the participation should operate. Instead, a producerly poem can simply be left alone as it is or as we have made it to be without thinking that we have been expressing ourselves through constructing a text. A poem considered popular in a producerly way generally is seen to have a meaning but it does not matter whether that meaning was already in the text or whether we put it there. Audiences of Martin's performances or books experience producerly texts when their response to what they are hearing or reading is an expression of who they are and what they believe. His producerly texts, therefore, give voice to many people not used to being heard. His popular poems empower an audience otherwise relegated to either the overly user-friendly texts (where they go away saying "what's the point?") or to overly complex texts that seem already closed off to them (where they again go away saying "what's the point?"-but for a different reason). One way Martin achieves this producerly response is through the creation of counterpointing simplicity .

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and-complexity in the same text. He therefore invites readers to participate in both readerly and writerly ways at the same time. Martin's producerly texts are-in Fiske's sense-"popular." In performance they offer themselves as popular productions. Whether performing Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, or his own poems, Martin creates juxtapositions that make it impossible to be operation-manual readerly. Instead, he will foreground ironies in the dialogue poems and one-act plays, multiple perspectives in the contrapuntal poems and narratives, and kaleidoscopic visions in the amalgamation of history and felt experience of slave life in The Logof the Vigilante. According to Fiske, a producerly text will expose itself as a text but allow readers a wide range of choices on where to participate, if anywhere at all. The text will, of course, present meanings as if they are embedded in itself, but then it will draw attention to its own vulnerabilities and to the limitations and weaknesses of what seem to be preferred meanings. Audiences catch the ironies of Dunbar's mask, of Hughes's Jesse B.Simple satire, and of the contradictions of Martin's recurring creation of the collective black female voice located in the soliloquies of his own poems. That dominant speaker of My Mother's Voice is producerly when it regularly expresses even as it tries to repress beliefs, attitudes, and feelings that contradict what the character herself seems to prefer. Consider: "I'm talking to you! / You better come back here and listen! / Lawd, Lawd, these children are going to be the death of us all, / Not that we ain't given them plenty of kindling wood" ("My Mother's Voice," HWMP). A producerly text that wants to empower an audience avoids being as easy as many readerly texts or as rule-governed as many writerly texts. It appears to contain forces that it also might want to repress. It gives voice to countercurrents that contradict the direction apparently preferred. Its meanings' in Fiske's terms again, will exceed its own powers to limit, determine, or discipline them. Here is where the reader is invited-but not cajoled or required-to join in on the meaning-construction. The producerly text will create gaps wide enough for readers to produce their own texts within the one they are reading and to feel either that what they have made is already in the text and that they got it, or that they made it and feel a powerful control over it. This freedom to open up the texts in this way is a particularly congenial process for Martin's multimedia artistic combinations, his contrapuntally friendly clashes, and his attempts to construct poetic voices in dialogue. Martin makes most written poems into producerly texts in his performances. Frequently a dual perspective runs through a poem or multiple characters explore ideas through dialogue. His contrapuntal structures not 92

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only juxtapose oppositions but run sounds on top of each other as in Bachlike counterpoint. He has been producerly throughout his career from the contrapuntal voices of New York the Nine Million and Other Poems (1969) to the polarized anger of The Shit-Storm Poems (1973), the point-counterpoint debates and "variations" of The Persistence of the Flesh (1976), the mutually canceling sounds of quiet in The Formsof Silence (1980) to the interplay of presence and absence in the memory poems of Galileo 's Suns (1999). These producerly texts empower the voices of that collective black woman of almost all his poems and of Willie Short, dying of AIDS. The enthusiastic but nonbinding invitation to participate also reenacts history in The Logof the Vigilante (1976, 2000) as a process that has already occurred but that recurs again and again upon each producerly reading. Central in these processes is the contrapuntal style, grace, and vision of his written and oral art forms as they collide and complement each other. Martin works along the borders of popular and elitist art by creating texts-on the page and in performance-that provide openings for readers and listeners to express themselves. He summarized for Eve Shelnutt what motivated much of his poetry: "Writing has always been used for entertainment and as an example," he suggested-sidestepping controversies about popularity: "If you write a novel about a love situation which is unbearable, the solution to that novel might mean something to someone in a similar situation. A poem might give someone a different perspective" ("UD's Herb Martin" 21). Building that connection with an audience is the critical artistic act as he described it to the DaytonDailyNews: "Just before I go out I get absolutely cold. My body temperature turns to ice. I start to wonder why I'm doing this to myself. Why am I torturing myself? I feel I'm about to make a real fool of myself." But soon it is all okay, and the making of the producerly text is on: "Then I get the cue and walk out and forget all of it. As soon as I see that sea of faces, I begin to try to shape and mold them. I want to find out what they want to hear" ("Rhyme with Reason"). His body temperature drops because Martin does not know for sure what the audience will do with the text. Once connected through eye contact and other interactions, however, he turns his text loose-with all its vulnerabilities and interpretive openings-and the partnership between performer and audience becomes producerly. In the midseventies considerable misunderstanding continued to arise about both dialect and attitudes toward slavery in Martin's performance of Dunbar's poems. On the one hand, slave life appears to be benign, even happy, in some of Dunbar's longer narratives; on the other hand, several levels of irony undercut that portrayal to suggest a more realistic angry tone EmpoweringAudiences

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about the injustices lived daily. In his one-man show Martin addressed these discrepancies by portraying multiple points of view not only in the poems but from Dunbar's letters and essays. In his own poems Martin gives voice to a wide variety of speakers who had their own views of black communities in the first half of the twentieth century. My Mother's Voice presents a generous sampling of a voice who is, though modeled on the poet's mother, also "black mothers" on the whole or "anyone's mother," doing her best to get her "children to become something that they think is safe and that will make a better life for them" ("Fire" 34546). He continued to enact the most embattled and tenacious dimension of that collective voice in FinalW· TheCancer Files, which is also the conclusion of his poetic autobiography, W Poems. These two manuscripts are unpublished collections (HWMP), though Martin later included selections from these manuscripts in publications such as Galileo's Suns and Logof the Vigilante, These unpublished collections are important indications of what his work emphasized in the 1980s and how his vision of community has gone on to inform his work over the past two decades. The controversies and ambivalences in Dunbar's portrayal of the black community raise similar questions about the voices Martin wants to capture in his own work. Confronting the"split" often found in Dunbar's work helped him to resolve issues that could be settled and to live with the irresolution still to be confronted. In "Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Vision of Community," what Martin calls the "apparent dichotomies" in Dunbar's views of community provide a valuable gloss on what he hoped to achieve in the complexities and contradictions of his own characters. In Martin's reading, the "split" in Dunbar's portrayal of community combines his mother's romanticized sense of the past oral life of slavery and his father's more realistic sense of its harsh consequences. The voices who speak reflect an almost idyllic tone of rural life juxtaposed with his"skeptical mistrust of the larger more dynamic urban neighborhoods."! On the one hand, "The Party" portrays an almost idyllic world that is "infectious and joyous." For Martin, Dunbar presents "real characters operating in a world of idealized time" where the characters are not only "free to move about" but also are "well dressed." They also have plenty to eat and "enjoy each other's company." They are, in short, a close-knit community where people speak out naturally about the human condition. "The Party" as a text provides more than enough ironies and openings for listeners to wonder about the accuracy and yet to see"a delightful sense of the possibility of community." Further, Mandy the hostess "shyly offers the hospitality of her home" as "an ingratiating example of community." Her joy in entertaining is counterbal94

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anced by the realism of her husband Tom, who must pay the bill. What Martin calls "the subtext" of Tom's role "keeps the gathering in perspective" (HWMP). On the other hand, in his performance of Dunbar's "An Antebellum Sermon," Martin creates what he calls a "community of shared information ... which judges right and wrong of Christians" (HWMP). The preacher shares information about the pharaoh and the children of Israel, hints at similarities with their own plight, and pulls back to the disclaimer that he is only talking about the Bible after all. The congregation understands that it must keep what Martin calls the "communal faith" through the guise of humor. And so the preacher and his congregation wear the mask that solidifies community and makes that communal dissembling a powerful weapon. Martin glosses all this with references to Dunbar's essays where he is less interested in camouflage and comes down directly on the side of the ethical and moral integrity of the rural community over and against the glitter and cynicism of the big city. While Dunbar sides with the rural community uplifted by education, he ultimately presents a complex network of interaction in the voices of his poems. Romanticized figures, angry protestors, and dissemblers interact through a montage of texts and subtexts. Martin brings to life on stage these "varied sides of a community" where many underrepresented ordinary folks share hospitality, fellowship, and political strategies. In his performances of Dunbar and in the writing and performing of his own poems, Martin emphasizes the subtexts and the constructedness of his texts that point to gaps inviting audience closure. In My Mother's Voice and Final W' The Cancer Files (two unpublished collections of poems) Martin enacts a vision of community through a succession of voices speaking in monologues, dialogues, and other dramatic settings. Foremost among the strong voices in these works of the mid-rcsos is that of his mother-actually not only his own mother but also collectively black mothers or mothers on the whole. Her advice is powerful, even controversial, and suggests dialogue with others who do not share their conclusions. The rhythm of the speech patterns and the music of the lines make these poems about not only loving advice but also magic and the power of the word. My Mother's Voice presents prototype Willie Mae Martin in her collective manifestations as "my mother," "an old woman," "Miss Molten, the preacherly black teacher," "Aunt Jemima," "affreeca desiree," Sojourner Truth, and a host of preachers, singers, musicians, and jivers of both genders. We also meet again Cousin Louise, Ace the winner, and "Chicago, alias Wesley Jones." Central to the poetry of this collection is the life and energies of the woman EmpoweringAudknc~

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who worked for Miss Ann even as she earned dividends in a savings account with the Lord. For her son she hummed the wisdom on into the night "as if somewhere in the evening air she heard a thousand songs and joined in." The songs she joined and passed on were spirituals, auction songs, and the "Runaway Blues." She knew from memory the adventures of "Ace." Though "born to be a sinner," he also "knows what it takes to make a home." She also preserved and passed on the story of Wesley Jones, nicknamed "Chicago," who "discovered his life's blood in 57 varieties of port which he learned to savor on the tongue." After nothing could heal the damage inflicted by time and circumstance "his body became a map, a chronicle of all the details of struggles with stone, earth, sun and rainy corners." After a whole life of search for sleep and rest and calm, in death at least he "sees through all eternity, knows where he is going; it is his something, his single advantage being dead." These are the lives and experiences and social truths she stores in her data bank of songs. From the simple honesty of "Sojourner's Song of freedom and truth" to the grandfather's "Black Jazz," the poems are tempered with irony. "Them words you is fooling around with don't make no sense," she advises her son the poet: "Here you sit from morning to night, / Writing down what you think is right. / Who ever told you, / You had the right to decide bad and good?" In a tone of ironic pride, she berates his talk about how much money white people make and his desire for fame and influence. "It don't make no never mind / How much you scream," she continues, and she "didn't have to go to no fool college to learn that." Finally she drives him to go off on his own as she tries (not too hard) to call him back: "Boy where is you going? / I'm talking to you! / You better come back here and listen! / Lawd, lawd, these children are going to be the death of us all, / Not that we ain't given them plenty of kindling wood." That intensity and irony are at the center of the long narrative "In the Evening," a pivotal poem in the collection. The story begins as an old woman rocks on a summer porch "screened against the flies," history written "in the multitudinous lines on her face." She recalls the black storm days as well as the times the Lord provided a shoulder to lean on and the praying house where the old people could really talk to God "in the deep of midnight, without any interruptions." She tells of when she was young and "had to work, it seems, all the time" in the kitchens of Miss Ann, who "invented, then perfected aggravation." One day she finds a glorious piece of shining glass in a lump of coal from the coal bin. "For the first time in my life," she recalls of its beauty, "I felt a peace / A joy, I have never been able to describe since." Of course Miss Ann demands that she give her that piece of glass. Her response to those repeated assaults speaks a lesson of history: 96

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Willie Mae Martin at her hom e in Toledo in th e early 1980s. Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Ma rtin.

"I just plain wrappe d all her com plain ts in love.. .. Yessir, I thought the onl y way to beat this old gal's aggravation / Wa s to wrap her up in soul." Th e lesson s of My Mother 's Voice culminate in a series of pronouncements meant to set th e record straight . "Playing until Forgetfulness Comes" is introduced by the words of a mother leaving for work: "Rem ember all these things I have said. " On that sum m er Monday the children pla y while their fath ers take th e in surance money to bu y liquor, trading "health and safety for Jack Daniels." Kids who w ere supposed to be on th e lookout are just playin g too hard to notice: "Her kid s didn 't know how to an swer her ra gin g sorrow / Nor ho w they could repair her whipped spirit / With their innocent and unlimited supply of love. " In "Dark Pronouncement," the po et compares his mother's voice to that of Old Miss Molten, who was "preacherly black" and could "curse her students w it h her left eye / While her right eye proceeded w ith the bu siness of roll calling." At the same time "My mother who was, equally, never at a loss for an astonishing metaphor" said to me with the sam e dark clarity of a curse: "You will, for all intents and purposes, end up shittin' / and steppin ' in it. " Her solution was quick, direct, simple, and influential : "You will need an expert recipe / for cleaning the scent from your shoes." Similarly sharp advice in "Monday" is reminiscent of Dunbar's "In the Morning." "Hear me , hear me ," the mother's voice Empowering Au diences

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proclaims: "Ain't going to say this but once / Monday morning ain't no time to be lazy man / Rise up, man, rise like the Clabber Girl." Find your soul emerging from fire, she says: "Rise up, man; light is passing by / Grab some of it before you die." Finally in the historical tribute "Aunt Jemima/ Uncle Tom," admiration, pride, and love correct the undeserved reputations of these important characters. No need to laugh at those two, she says, because he "paved the road whereon you march" and "she smiled a good foundation." Humble and vigilant in their pursuit of freedom, they create a legacy for a community of fellow travelers: "So don't jive in my face now, about the spirits of those two / They are truly the reason you can do whatever you do." The forceful voice of collective black mothers in these poems is often irreverent, even outlandish. Gaps in the texts invite closure from an audience who will alternately sit back and enjoy or indulge themselves in the pleasures of making their own meanings. Deliberate discrepancies in her arguments and the foregrounding of ironies create a vulnerability in a text that reads against itself. Writing is foolishness, fame is fleeting, deciding what is good and what is bad is presumptuous, and screaming "don't make no sense." All the disavowed "devil's work" of foolishness in the end has been encouraged by the parental "kindling wood" after all. "Forgetfulness "is both forgetting the insurance money and the healing forgiveness after the rant. The two voices of eye-cursing Miss Molten and the mother of astonishing metaphors merge. The restrictive dissembling of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom turns out to be liberating and empowering. Simple statements and complex overtones are counterpointed so that the text reads against itself. In response the audience is invited to perform what John Fiske calls a cultural analysis that "will reveal both the way the dominant ideology is structured into the text and into the reading subject and those textual features that enable negotiated, resisting, or oppositional reading to be made" (ReadingthePopular98). This negotiation of meaning creates the possibility of affirmation or resistance and is therefore the major strength of a popular text. It also worries writers and causes a performer's temperature to drop precisely because it is what Fiske calls "risky business, for the meanings that people make will often evade social control-they may be offensive, oppositional, embarrassing" (195). The stories expressing a vision of community in My Mother's Voice are heard in the old woman's humming, in affreeca desiree's letter about freedom, in the spiritual looking for Jesus "on the holy road," or in "Sojourner's Song," "The Black Man's Auction Song," the early-morning blues, "Black Jazz," "The Sermon in the Old Style," boasts, retorts, funeral orations, and 98

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jives. This compendium of musical forms invites audiences to join with voices that affirm the power of community. "Sojourner's Song" is a plea to ride on the freedom train and follow the truth seeker's invitation to "Sojourn with me. / My train see in the dark, / It knows every twist and turn; / It has heard the song of the free lark. / My course is set straight in the dark." Woven into this poem and the volume are spirituals that unify the individual selections and underscore the theme of empowerment: "I am walkin' and talkin' this mornin' / With my mind set on freedom." The volume is organized as a performing script to create the same effects Martin achieves in his poetry concerts. "Ace" who "hussles the tussle" and "grapples the grip" is surrounded by blues songs. The 1864 letter from a freed slave is juxtaposed with "Spiritual" and "He who leadeth me / On the Holy Road." "The Black Man's Auction Song" warns, "Don't nobody here dare to talk / Ain't no freedom here on this block" and "A man best not be bold up here / Because if he does, mark it for sure / If he tries to keep wife or child / He's sure to lose his life." Several blues songs sing of lost loves where "The blues is sniffin' my tracks / I gotta find my old man / Make him want to come back" ("Blues Piece"). Readers may want to sing the poems in this volume; in performance they roll in and out of the story being told as successive voices have their say: "Monday, Monday comes too soon ... Thursday, Thursday is a painful day ... Sunday, Sunday, Sunday all day long / I sleep and sleep and sleep / 'Cause early, early in the week / You go to earn some money to / Keep your body from growing weak" ("Early Morning Blues"). Jazz, jives, sermons, and moans fill in this symphony of musical forms. In "Black Jazz," the poet's grandfather is "an obdurate man who / Played trumpet on the smallest breath of air." The "walls clapped for joy" and the "house seemed to sway" with the music that beats to the rhythm of "Ace," who is "smooth as frying grease and hot as oil," and "He don't tick, he don't tock ... Ace is fast, Ace is sure / Ace is quick, Ace is pure." There is plenty of mischief in this sequence of stories collected here: overly reverent and irreverent sermons, the R-rated arrival of Miss Minnie Mae at church, and "Four Jives" that dart in and rush out between somber historical narratives: "Look-a-there at sweet Miss Corvette / ... A dime to as nickel; a double buffalo bet / She ain't nee-ver, ev-er, been had yet." Or "Cadillac, Cadillac where you been? / Round the town and back again." Like his partner in camouflage, Martin revels in the Dunbar-like "Sermon in the Old Style," where his mother's collective voice wages the war between "two fo' ces vyin' for your faith." On the one hand is mighty Jesus, who rolls that awful stone away; and then there is the open casket for James Americanus Crow, who is EmpoweringAudiences

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"BAD" and as "one of Satan's / Right-hand henchmen" imitated "the jealous Fallen Angel/Who was never satisfied / With the lives he ruined." The preacher warns about those devils who never take a rest: "Dey never take a day off to play golf / or to go shopping. / Devil's don't need rest! / Dey simply lie in wait / Fo' you to slip, stumble, fall / And den dey surround you / With an evil grip." But there is always hope to "Reach out for the hem of Jesus" and follow to where "There is plenty good room / Good room in my Father's kingdom." The audience is invited to participate ("Say Amen") and in performance "Sermon in the Old Style" becomes a self-reflexive text where the audience watches itself responding to the preacher. All builds to the crescendo of this preacher's song as he asks, "Where are you banking at this hour? Are you ready to be called to account? Will you receive eternal interest"-and again the community of support past and present merges for hope: "And tho' Jim Crow lies here dead / His ideas, thought, dreams have / Survived him, are his descendants." "Say Amen," the preacher tells the congregation and readers. The vulnerability and popularity of this text allow in a range of responses from readers who choose to mix right in and shout hallelujah or sit back in a more distanced, calculated, and ironic respouse." Two additional church poems balance out the contraries and fill in the deliberate textual gaps that invite producerly readers to reach back and use their own voices. "Epistle to Another Time" returns to memories of the poet's youth in Birmingham, Alabama, at the funeral of Cousin Louise, whose voice had "encouraged every directive / And insulated our house against segregated ills / And impaled normal worry." The poet, now "too old to remember exactly who you were," thinks back on "lost family communion." Uncle Ad had "simply stopped one day on the streets of Birmingham / Leaned over and kissed the sidewalks that always hated him," and now Cousin Louise had also "taken leave of us." As if to counterpoint the solemnity of the funeral service, Martin closes the volume with the mischievous narration "When Miss Minnie Mae Come to Church." Feeling like "a new stuffed sausage, all puffed and preened and polished," the poet recalls "the Sunday when my nose first became alert to the soap the girls used." Whenever Miss Minnie Mae moved down the aisle in spiked heels "everything moved in double time: du dah, du dah; da umph, da umph; du dah, du dah." A chorus of male eyes followed her every move and the "electricity in the air" was woven into the service itself. The entire poem is counterpoint of the Reverend Bosstich's text and the youthful eyes watching to see "who was going to show off her newest slip" and other items: "This was the salvation we came to church for and we were not disappointed." There was

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always plenty to talk about: "Color. Lace. Silk. No lace. Expensive. Washed. Dirty. Cheap. Tight. Too loose." Soon the reverend would "throw gasoline on his preaching" and light up the church: "It was the redemption of the stone pushed aside, and the serenity of the empty tomb disclosed for all to see and believe. He pronounced on all a hymn of peace, a benediction of love and sent us out unto the Mount of Olives to do good but all I would remember that week was the du duh ... of Miss Minnie Mae's walk as she altered forever the way I would think about women." Perhaps one pers,on helping another to die with some dignity and comfort is the ultimate affirmation of community. From the experience of his mother's dying of cancer, Martin revisits once more in Final W that collective voice of black mothers in memory, music, and the strong bonds between generations. FinalW·TheCancerFiles is a collection of thirty poems that re-create memories and pay tribute to the poet's mother in life and death.' Arranged in a pattern resembling a musical composition, the poems celebrate a remarkable individual who is aware of her role in constructing and preserving a living history. FinalW reads like the libretto of an opera or musical with each crucial stage of living and dying celebrated as an aria. "First I Watched You" confronts the onset of a tumor and the decision to amputate her leg. "Death Is the Third Participant in Our Lives" introduces the cast of characters. "Words Are the Geography of Our World" sings of the poet's task to make sense out of events as "Your Sickness Became a Crazy Quilt" records the progress of the disease. "Love Is the Bearer of All Change" recognizes what will yet endure, and "You, Who First Gave Me Shelter" is juxtaposed with "Now It Is My Turn to Keep the Watch." Again Martin mixes the rhythms of singing in the night ("I Shall remember / How well you sang") and the J. S. Bach cantata "we savour on the tongue" with the bittersweet music of birth and death: "I rock you in lullaby time. / I adjust your body to the / Comfort of my arms." The musical structure of FinalW pushes forward in an effort to find meaning even in what seems senseless and unexplainable. "My heart is your conductor," the poet assures the dying woman. "It reads the score, / Hears the rhythms, / Verbalizes the melodies. / Music is the hardest dance." As sentry to his mother's dying, the poet remembers the songs of her living in contrast to the "layers of silence" slowly taking over. He dresses her and feeds her and wheels her out into the "remarkable morning air." Together they reenact the journey of Icarus and"dance together the time / We have left." An old priest visits ("he is dying too"), the physician charts out the withering of her body; through it all the poet searches for "the syntax of understanding." Closer to

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the "dying time," his mother endures an "unnegotiable pain" that explodes throughout the interior of her "frail but wildly wise body." Like Anaximander measuring the ancient skies, she sings, "I learn the rules of song." And the poet listens: "When your spirit has left / Your body's enclosure. / I shall remember / How well you sang." In the end the poet absorbs that musical beat and is ready to pass it on too: "It has taken me a long time / To understand the recitatives / And arias, the spiraling coloratura / Punctuating scales of silence," he recalls. Finally what endures are "Phrases, suited only to your tongue / To the mystery and strength / Of your vocal cord." The ultimate triumph of Final W is not death but the enduring community of those who go on reconstructing the stories of history and passing them on to future generations. "In the indescribable darkness / Of my daughter's eyes," the poet-father finds an enduring vision: "She does not realize / The changes affecting her speech / As she bids me 'goodnight' / In your voice." The poet's syntax breaks through to understanding finally in the poem/aria that would serve as a refrain in this opera celebrating how community is created and sustained: "Tell me the story of your mother's death, / So that I may tell my child / Who, in turn, will acknowledge / Your life to her child / By telling this same story again. / Memory continues." Final W moves methodically through the files of memory from the discovery ("I am sorry I do not have good news. / The cancer has metastasized") through the hospital stays and the hope for hope, the ravaging ("Through your body / There is an unmistakable riot / Seducing your wary flesh") through the caring ("Now it is my turn to keep the watch / over the unstable thud of your pulse") straight to the end ("Goodnight Mother, goodnight / My daughter and I say our prayers"). Memory, medical research, painful counterpoint dialogue, and the writing process itself collide and merge. The prologue-"A Preface to Dying" -announces: "All memory seems to coagulate like clotted blood / heavy, needing a cheese mesh, a strainer, a thinner, / so that I may sort out the details / of your illness more carefully." Though we anticipate the outcome from the beginning, there is talk that "she is a strong old bird" who has seen devastation and might yet "take flight again." He goes to her empty house to remove "its empty effects" and studies the "partial truths / in albums of portraits." He cleans as if cleaning would restore life and then he visits her once again. As if awaiting a miracle and dreams of cures, he remembers her story told long ago: "While I slept I dreamed / of washing clothes in an iron pot, / that could boil away cancers. What blankets and sheets of illness / I washed." He remembers "the nightmare rinse water" he carried as a child. The water "never thickened ... never darkened," and yet the clothes were "justly clean / after 102

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four pure / rinse waters." He dreams again that he bought an iron bed and "an iron pot to boil our dirty clothes in. The water was scalding; it ate the dirt." Did the bed help, he wants to know. "I did not sleep with ease," she answers. She endured through all. "From stroke to amputation to final cancer," he recalls. She teaches lessons once more in her dying: "Remember we measure achievement by what we do with time. This is the clearest approach to truth you taught me." The thousand songs she hummed in the night are everywhere in the memories, prayers, and lessons of these last days and weeks. To a honkytonk melody on the radio they drive. She says "No time is ever once and once only." And again: "I leave it to my true friends / to tell the tales of my life." When you are finally gone, he assures her, "I shall remember / how well you sang. / I shall hold / the breath of your song / within my cheeks." He remembers she sang him "a mad song once," ironically a dying song: "My tears are dry splinters / Death will bundle them ... I have taught you the rules of song." And they would dance again. "Do not hesitate; / Do not be late; / Waltz me in three quarter / hesitation. / Let us dance together; this is our last dance," she affirms. "Mother we shall never / dance so well again." Or at least, in the end, it would be a very different kind of dance. "I sing you an excellent lullaby; / I adjust your resting body / to the comfort of your coffin. "His heart reads the score, balances the rhythms and harmonies, and he now hums the melodies: "This waltz is the hardest of all dance." Final W never romanticizes disease, dying, or heroic struggles to endure. But the connections between generations are celebrated even when all else is lost. He asks, "Tell me the story of your own mother's death / So that I may tell it to my daughter," who then will keep your story alive for her offspring as we "brick our lives with a history of detail." But the poet's mother can't restore those bricks right now. She remembers gossiping in the kitchen when word came that "Mama Julia was dead." A cause was never found. In a "Reprise," some of those details came back later: "I read it in my own feelings. / The kitchen was warm with fresh biscuits, coffee and fried fat for the men / heading off to work. / When the truth arrived / I was beneath the house / Weeping in the winter debris." And his daughter asks the hard question: "Why does it have to happen?" His answer-the body wears out, gets "holes in it / like shoe soles"-will work for now. She says goodnight-"in your voice." When she answers, there are more questions "I do not answer / For fear she will detect / How easy it is for me to lie." And again the links are tightening: "Already she speaks / With the rhythms of your voice." She is becoming wise already ("Her eyes say / She understands")-assuring that community will stretch across space and way out EmpoweringAudknc~

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into time: "Somewhere in the future / a child will ask / 'How did you survive / watching your mother die?' Grandma's mother died when she was six and now you are six, he has to say. 'Is this a tradition,' she asks-and 'Falls asleep in the midst of the lesson. '" In FinalW, the cancer files are a running dialogue of rapid-fire questions, combative exchanges, and the ultimate in contrapuntal puzzles. The two lead characters are "in rehearsal" ("Lights, Applause"): "Why is the sun so cold?" / "It is dying." / "Why are my dreams so vivid?" / "You are alive." As night descends she asks who has "auctioned the light." Madness is lost through caution, he says. She asks: "What will you bury me in?" We enter and depart the world alone, they agree. Through it all they still fight with words flying from their tongues. "I am angry that you maneuvered your death." She did what she did without reason, out of necessity. "Is being in pain necessary?" The answers are stand-offs only: "Some deaths are that way." Sometimes we choose; other times a rare insanity seems to transcend even love. They remain embattled, and even the sacred record keeping of the word does not go unscathed. "You are my private product," she digs in. He does get the last word: "I will edit you." He will continue to preserve and reconstruct the events, the questions, the voice. "Words are the geography of our travel. / We take the necessary highways," he insists, as if to persuade himself. "In your house there are still many gestures" and much work yet for the word to do: "I try to delineate the meridian of choices, / the uncharted territories which blaze / black light against / our sudden discoveries." These discoveries will keep coming as long as the word gives voice to the community that endures. A priest reminds them that "radiation is a whirlwind" so "God must know what he is doing." The poet keeps the records and preserves his aunt's reassurance that she once knew God and he "makes no mistakes." Pronounce the name, tell the story of her death, keep performing the words-but the poet wonders: "Where is the dark syntax of this conversation leading?" While reason offers no comfort for our "stuffed prayers" that try to buffer "your coffin slipping from public view," the circle is completed in tradition, legacy, and the voice that goes on in unfolding the story: "She might surprise us / And take flight again. / Her personal geography understands / the art of flight better than we think." That voice was to take flight again and again, of course, in the stories collected in volumes and presented on stage over the next three decades. That collective voice of black mothers and the community they keep alive is at the center of TheLogo! the Vigilante, Southern Voices, and Galileo's Suns. The mother's voice endures in the persistent counterpoint of sharp debates and multiple perspectives running all through Martin's work. 104

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Willie Mae Martin died of cancer in the early spring of 1986. At her funeral a sampling of her music was kept alive in the voices of all the characters modeled on her example: "The Lord Is My Shepherd," "Trust in the Lord, and Do Good," some spirituals. The ceremony included jazz, blues, moans, and jive in her honor. There were sermons-and a eulogy by the son with whom she still wrestles. "Mamma, grandma, mamma Martin, Aunt Patty, Miss Martin, Willie, Willie Mae, and Mae," he pronounced some of the names, "You are her legacy," he told family and friends (journal entries in HWMP). "I didn't bite my tongue," she often said. "My mother was opinionated in the difficult sense of that word, and in the best sense of that word," and she didn't sit on the fence ever. Her voice would go on making the best poetry; it would empower audiences and create an unstoppable sense of community: "She was my best and most considered advisor. We didn't always agree on solutions, but her percentage of accuracy was extraordinary. I shall miss her enlightened voice." Miss Sarah Bissell, Herbert's University of Toledo professor and mentor, brought balloons to Willie Mae Martin's funeral. At the height of the ceremony an old and weak balloon lost air and twirled its way into the casket. In a prose poem, "Family," Martin has added one final tribute to that mother's voice which nurtured him, aggravated him, and taught him to stand on his own. He recalls their earliest days when, after the breakup of his parents' marriage, he and his mother lived in a compact room where they "made do on faith and prayers" (in manuscript, HWMP). Eventually she always found "a better and another better room." After public housing, "where we were robbed of our trust and good spirits," they moved into their first home "where we painted and cleaned and made a firm foundation with the new neighbors, took in several roomers, but only the men survived the extraordinary demands my mother made" (journal entries in HWMP). The women always left. They left "in disgust" because they could never equal "her sense of cleanliness or godliness." "Poor women," the speaker recalls. "All the Eves of our lives driven from us with sharp words." No maid could ever work alongside her when she was in charge. If by chance one of those women might reach the standard, none could leap over it or "maintain the intensity of the flourish." They learned and they were moved by that voice-but they all also "either quit or were let go." No doubt Martin was remembering all this as he reflected on what he learned and how he made his own way: "One day, like all the Eves of our lives, I decided to walk into freedom. Self containment. Mama had trained me well, now I was saying goodbye to her." The powerful voice that had created identity and hope would send the son off on his own: "She had trained me well, given me a EmpoweringAudiences

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Depression Will, a tenacious notion that something better was coming. Waiting was never an option. Only motion, moving forward-and that is how I crossed the George Washington Bridge and entered New Yorksmiling" ("Family," HWMP). My Mother's Voice and Final W remain pivotal unpublished collections that signal Martin's commitment to empowering audiences through memory, historical reenactment, and dialogue. In the nineties he moved away from efforts to publish these volumes as he had earlier constructed them. Instead, he selected numerous pieces from each work to include in Galileo's Suns, A Matter ofHonor, and TheLogof the Vigilante. Nonetheless, these celebrations of powerful voices remain important transitional works between the earlier contrapuntal and political testimonies and his later efforts to reenact history in volumes of poems, opera librettos, and in performances of his own and Paul Laurence Dunbar's poems. Over the next twenty years, Martin's work moved along several parallel tracks. There would be three new volumes of poems, and two new directions in his career as he took on the roles of opera librettist and Paul Laurence Dunbar scholar. The seeds of each new project can be traced to these two autobiographical collections that remain laboratories for what would evolve.

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Celebrations The Forms of Silence and the Seeds of New Projects

The ten years beginning in 1977 were busy, productive, and full of surprises both professionally and personally for the poet-in-residence and professor now settled in his career. With two degrees in hand and yet thinking back to sentiments he expressed to University of Toledo professor Sarah Bissell in a letter fifteen years earlier, Martin would once again pursue "that most elusive of all things-a degree" (HWMP). In 1977 he was accepted into the doctoral program at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The University of Dayton granted him a year's leave, and the rest of the time he worked around his schedule of teaching, writing, and performing. Obsidian had published the year before the first version of his narrative poem "History: The Log of the Vigilante," and a greatly expanded version of that narrative would become his research project and dissertation over the next two years (and then became in a third version a prize-winning book twenty years later). Martin moved to Pittsburgh for fifteen months beginning in the summer of 1977. In a poetry workshop in the fall he met Elizabeth Susan Altman, an undergraduate student from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, who was living in Pittsburgh. Brought together by class projects and many shared interests, the two met over coffee and gave each other advice on what to read, how to write, and what to do to avoid writer's block. Altman, he would soon discover, was already a published poet and the mother of a six-year-old daughter, Sarah. Theirs was not a courtship destined to make the literati gossip columns but rather became a genuine warm friendship that grew, as Martin describes in his next book, "moment by moment ... ever so slightly" with a "suddenness ... that takes the heart" (TheForms ofSilence 14). After Martin's year in residence at Carnegie-Mellon and Altman's graduation, he returned

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Elizabeth Susan Altm an and Herbert Woodward Martin exchange we dding vows, June 9, 1979 . Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Martin.

to his teaching post and she enrolled in a master's program at the University of Dayton. In the summer of 1979 , several celebrations converged in ways that would match the best of the contrapuntal poems. PaulLaurenceDunbar: ASinger ofSongs, Martin 's monograph, was published by the Ohio Historical Society. In the late spri ng he graduated with a Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing from Carnegie-Mellon University. Martin recalls at the ceremony sitting next to Richard Wilbur, who was being given an honorary degree ("Fire" 354). On June 9, Altman and Martin exchanged marriage vows in Dayton. Martin observes a certain symmetry in his journal when he notes that the royalt y from the Dunbar book paid for th e wedding expenses. In the , acknowledgments for the book he thanks "Elizabeth S. Altman for her assistance and encouragement" (HWMP). In "The Act of Bricking Love," he writes: "Let us complete our gesture together / Finalize the act , coda the music, / The architectural composition / With a sustaining veneer / Against those fortuitous years / When we are ill / When we are quietly dying" (16). On September 19,1980, their daughter Julia wa s born ("Julia 's Day," he calls it in letters on that date years later, HWMP). Nam ed after his mother's mother, the Martins' dau ghter would become a part of that community of voices enacted in the poetry of the next two decades. The family of four was busy. Martin's fourth book of poems, TheForms of Silence, was published by Lotus Press in 1980. Two teacher-poets raising two children required that writing slow slightly. "All is up in the Air," "All is 10 8

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Martin with daugbter Iulia in Dayton 1980 . Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Martin .

hectic here," "I am simply trying to hang on," "Our schedule is frantic," read the letters at the time (HWMP). The pace did not slow much . Martin was poetry editor of the Great Lakes Review, and when Robert Hayden died in 1980, he edited a special issue, "Midwestern Miscellany," of fifty poems in his honor. Another tribute to Hayden, by Martin ("Everything Sensible and Everything Lovingly Human") followed in the spring of 1982. In 1981 he established The Herbert Woodward Martin Papers at the Canaday Center at the University of Toledo Library, and his wife began to celebrate Martin's moving at least some of those boxes of effluvium out of the house. Sue continued to publish poetry, completed her master's degree at the University of Dayton, taught a variety of courses, worked as a librarian, and enrolled in a doctoral program at Miami University (in Oxford, Ohio). Martin taught creative writing and literature, res umed his schedule of Dunbar performances and readings of his own poems, and acted in several plays. He also worked Celebrations

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with Twentig Productions on a Dunbar filmstrip with narration (1984), the predecessor to his own full-length video project that was to emerge later. The 1980s were a time of considerable praise and numerous awards along with some harsh criticism. Robert Hayden's poem "Paul Laurence Dunbar," dedicated to Martin, was published in the Michigan Quarterly and in Hayden's book AmericanJournal. 1 In 1981 Time magazine referred to Martin's "A Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary" as a "flashpoint" in literature about the war. Counterpointed with national notoriety were some warning flags. On May 21, 1982, longtime mentor and friend Judson Jerome wrote to Martin: "I think your art is all bulloxed up in self expression in these poems, that you probably can't see them clearly because you're reading through tears. Roll me over easy, my wounds are hurtin' so." Jerome was responding to a series of poems in progress called at the time "The Penitential Poems." He hastened to add in the same letter, "I hope you hear through all this a genuine respect for what I know you can do" (HWMP). "The Penitential Poems" grew into The Last Days of William Short (see chapter 7). Seven years later Jerome wrote an assessment of Martin's work over the twenty-five years he had watched it grow: "Most of his published work avoids the extremes of both formality and folksiness.... It is a great pleasure to witness Herb's performance at a reading. A remarkably powerful, theatrical, sometimes bawdy personality emerges from a man who, off-stage, has a quiet, mildmannered, courteous, and genteel manner."2 Reviews of his published work and performances were favorable and strong. His poems in Milestone Sampler:Fifteenth AnniversaryAnthology, published by Lotus Press, received high praise: "A similar richness of tone and texture, though of a more personalized nature, abounds in the poetry of Herbert Woodward Martin.... The clarity, subtlety and refreshing sensibility of this poet is evident in all five of his poems published in this collection" ("Writing in the City" 27). The same kind of reaffirming testimony is seen in Howard Nernerov's reference to Martin's mature poetry as "unique and striking." The Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of English (Washington University, St. Louis) and National Poet Laureate continues: "It's not my sort of thing, that's plain enough, but I sometimes have the suspicion it means more than my sort of thing." In a letter to Martin, Nemerov also underscored his trademark ability to achieve new combinations through counterpoint: "His combination of plainest direct assertion with gnomic and riddling question makes his voice convincing when he faces up to, as he does in the best of these poems, the themes of pain, grief, and loss; he deals with human helplessness honestly and courageously" (November 27, 1986,HWMP). Nemerov sent this testimony to Martin, thanking him for entrusting his 110

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"new work to this old person, who on the accompanying sheets-because everyone is impressed by a title, especially if it is three lines long-has deposed on your behalf the best he knows how" (HWMP). Rounding out a decade of celebrations, the Dayton Theater Guild presented Martin with its best supporting actor award for his portrayal of Puck in A Midsummer Night'sDream. While Martin received his own accolades in these years, many of his projects at this time paid tribute to the achievements of other writers. In 1980 and 1982 he honored the works of Robert Hayden. In 1986 he worked simultaneously on two very different kinds of projects. Along with fellow poets Raymond Patterson and Erlene Stetson he solicited, collected, and edited material for a special edition of the German publication Der Rabe, intended to feature the work of Black American poets. After considerable work and behind-the-scenes problems, the issue never appeared. At the same time, he conceived, planned, and hosted an Emily Dickinson Centennial Symposium at the University of Dayton in the fall of 1986. The University of DaytonReview followed with a special number on the proceedings (Winter 1987-88). Milestone Sampler, a celebration of fifteen years for Lotus Press, edited by Naomi Long Madgett, appeared in 1988. Few other activities slowed down. The 1987 BookofDays (Encyclopedia of Information Sources on Historical Figures and Events, Keyed to Calendar Dates) features Martin's entryon the birthday of Paul Laurence Dunbar. His performances continued to enlarge the community for poetry-from school readings to Senior Citizen's Days sponsored by the Council on Aging. And the educational workshops expanded. He introduced Dunbar at the American Music Jubilee in February 1990; at the Eighteenth Annual Poetry Day 1988, he conducted a session on "Taking Control of the Poem: 30 Things to Do" (HWMP). There would be more celebrations as well. For the Gerard Manley Hopkins Centennial Celebration, Martin wrote lyrics to accompany the original music of Charles Mason, based on "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and other Hopkins poems (University of Dayton, October 19-22,1989). A decade that had begun with Martin's marriage, a doctor of arts degree, a new book, and the birth of a child, and moved through awards received and tributes to others would end with the awarding of a Fulbright scholarship to lecture and write in Hungary. In the summer of 1990, Martin first taught in London, and then the family was off for the Fulbright to Janus Pannonius University in Pees, Hungary. The tributes to Hayden, the new book of poems (The Forms of Silence, 1980), the Dickinson and DerRabe projects, and TheMilestone Sampler (1988) warrant a closer look because they show advances in the evolution of Celebrations

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Martin's counterpoint artistry. The influential poet Robert Hayden was a mentor and close friend to Martin for more than thirteen years. The English anthologist Rosey Poole (editor of Beyondthe Bless, published in London) introduced him to Hayden's work in 1967. She also encouraged him to visit Hayden, which he did regularly for over a decade. Each trip from Dayton up to Michigan to teach, perform, or consult would include a stop in Ann Arbor, where Hayden taught at the University of Michigan. Their meetings were "joyous," "comforting," "rewarding," and always instructive (journals in HWMP). They reflected often on the wisdom of Dr. Poole that had brought them together. Of course Hayden's "Middle Passage" influenced two generations of African American poets, novelists, and historians. In 1971 Hayden had included Martin's "A Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary" in his anthology Afro-AmericanLiterature:An Introduction. But in those frequent meetings together, Hayden created that "personification" of "true patience" that Martin most recalls: "He has encouraged us when we were good; he has been forbearing of our bad taste, and gracious enough to wait until we discovered the difference."3 Hayden traveled to Dayton often throughout the seventies to lecture, read from his poems, and visit schools in the area. Martin would generally host his visits and introduce his public appearances. On one such occasion they made a pilgrimage to Dunbar's grave-an event celebrated in "Paul Laurence Dunbar," a widely anthologized poem that Hayden dedicated to Martin: "We lay red roses on his grave, speak sorrowfully of him / as if he were but newly dead." Though Dunbar was"a young poet dead" years before his two admirers were born, they shared the same cry from the heart, and his poems were "beguiling as an elder / brother's lore." Here is Martin's recollection of the day from his journal of May 3, 1975: "We went to a florist where Hayden bought two roses for the Dunbar grave .... This was a prayerful time for Hayden remembering a poet who had lived and died before either of us were born. That evoked a sadness in both of us. We weighted the flowers with a plastic fork .... Hayden wept as we drove away. I was quiet for a long time afterwards" ("Everything Sensible" 48-49). Here is the way Hayden's concluding stanza saw it: "The roses fluttered in the wind; / we weight their stems / with stones, then drive away."4 More subdued and more formally ceremonial, the poem immortalizes a significant meeting of three poets with a shared tradition, beliefs, and values.) Nearly four months later, when Martin visited Hayden and his wife Erma, he learned that a poem in progress would be dedicated to him. On two "privileged times" Martin heard him read the poem: once in Dayton and then at the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh. Hayden also dedicated "The Ragman" to Martin, who had told him about a local-color 112

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Martin with (left) Robert Hayden and (right) Gogisgi (Carroll Arnett ) after visiting Paul Laurence Dunbar's grave on the anniversary of his death , February 9, 1977. Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Martin.

Dayton man during one of his visits. "In scarecrow patches and tatters, face to the wind, the Rag Man walks the winter streets ignoring the cold," he begins: "He strides in his rags and wordless disdain. ... Where is he going or coming from? He would not answer if we asked, ignoring our presence as he would our brief concerns" (AmericanjournaI17). Martin returned his admiration in several memorial tributes to Hayden. His preface to the special number of the Great LakesReview (Summer 1980) records that he had "long gone to school to the craft, skill and particular vision" of the remarkable poet who gave us what Shelley called "planetary mu sic for the mortal ears" and whose body of work "can still speak to our human hearts about all things meaningful" (2) . Two years later he writes of his mentor that he wa s "a poet of the first magnitude ... a man and a poet who se vision embraced everything sensible and everything lovingly human. " His poems "cause us to keep the best that is in all of us " ("Everything Sensible " 49). Hayden's poems from "A Ballad of Remembrance" and "Middle Passage" to "The Diver" and "Paul Laurence Dunbar" encouraged some of the best of Martin's work over the next two decades. Shortly after Hayden's death, Martin dedicated his next book, TheForms ofSilence, to "In Memoriam: Celebrations

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Robert Hayden (1913-1980)." The silence spoken in the volume shows a different side of Martin's work, one less indebted to performance of the word and more to experimentation with visual form and structural elements best seen on the page. While the silence is an ironic use of pauses and inference, many of the poems in this collection depend on a visible language and a sometimes complementary, other times juxtaposed combination of elegies of dying and plans to go on living. Love poems dominate, as do historical reenactments and shudders of death; there are several new contrapuntal poems as well as experiments with the sonnet and the sestina. The visual contours of TheForms ofSilence contrast sharply with Martin's earlier books. The forty-three poems in this collection do not read like a performance script. There are no spirituals or blues songs connecting contrasting sections, and there is less music overall. These poems are meant to be seen on the page in their visual configurations. Their visible language dimensions draw attention throughout to a self-conscious sense of constructedness. More than anywhere else in his work, a self-reflexivity emerges to exhibit language about languaging, art about making art, poems about the process of making poems. In these works, deliberate signposts to structures dominate with long breaks and pauses, drawing attention to how the components of structures coalesce and break apart. Poetic forms are elasticized: the elegy, sonnet, octave, and sestina. Museum pieces and imagistic snapshots zoom us in closer to the dominating silence. TheForms ofSilence opens with a sprawling rant of sorts, "American Confessional." Deciding to be direct, simple, and unencumbered, the speaker sets out on a "natural pattern over the / Rasp rugged tongue through the cage of teeth through the / underbrush / of syntax"-set on a course of making "sound tangible to the eye" (9). The organizing principle is the breath, the impulse, where "the comma pulls back / your breath / And the blind period renews the vision" (9). In the confessional tradition of Ginsberg and Sexton, the speaker pours out in fourteen installments an intoxicating barrage of sorrows, nightmares, and struggles to achieve an equilibrium in "the human form amazing." "Sometimes," the speaker notes, "commending and commenting on the truth" is as painful as is acknowledging the mystery that "nothing will last nothing stays" (12). Like most confessionals, this one concludes in irresolution that launches into the problematic selections to follow. First, though, Martin juxtaposes against the conflicts a peaceful song of new love. In the poem "The Forms of Silence" (dedicated "For: Sue" and written during their first months together) the poet begins: "In this sharpest of all winters / I am considering / What we have come to mean to each 114

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other" (14). In the search for truth along the plumb line to the bone and in each other, the way is quiet and rough: "So this is what love is / Restless, impossible, unending / An ulcer in the groin that bleeds / A stomach that excommunicates, / An eye that devours all light" (14). Not exactly the stuff of idealized Shakespearean sonnets, the images match the cold winds of winter, the "porous mountains and cliffs" that give way to spring (14). But love fights its way through and grows with an astonishing quietness: "Look in what a stillness your green plants grow. / Hardly, does the surrounding air move" (15). We hear only their silence, and their change is so light-like the change that plants and nurtures a new love until "A suddenness takes the heart" (15). Guilt devours the poet and he doubts his own compassion "when I know that you are crying"-but in the end it is "the act of bricking love" that "will hold against the wind." The poem concludes with a promise of hope and a bittersweet lament for a growing old that has not yet come: "Let us complete our gesture together / Finalize the act, coda the music, / The architectural composition / With a sustaining veneer / Against those fortuitous years / When we are ill / When we are quietly dying" (16). While this is not the fiery sordidness of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, neither is this poet's "Penelope" waiting patiently for Odysseus's return to Pittsburgh or Dayton. These are courtship poems of a sort. "Showering I" and "Showering II" are cleansing poems of renewal (17-18). "Dressing" offers refreshment and a chance "to try a different route, to go another way" (19). Elizabeth Susan Altman's poems of this time create a counterpoint worthy of Martin's own contrapuntal. In "Traveling Poem I" she explores the silences through which we move: "Taken by the Fields / We stop to give a closer look" at the blowing trees, the crow, the water cutting through the earth and concludes: "We feel apart from it. / We see it all like chalk / Where the body has fallen" (79). That same year the poet is talking to her partner (or listening to the weather forecast?) "On a snow-blown, wind burned, sunless morning" ("I doubt you"). She poses the unanswerable: will hair and skin freeze and "will it touch muscle next to bone?" ("On This Morning" 79). Two other poems suggest both restless urging and overvigilance. "The Watch" catches a woman seeing too much grain in a table, too much green in the plants, and doing too much analyzing on her own watch: "She watches the children / to name innocence, / She watches herself / to try to guess her age, / It is too much watching" (80). Finally is the "you" in "You Treat Dough as Enemy" about husbandman-breadmaker-poet HWM? "I slap dough" and "tuck it thoroughly into itself," she begins, to "just get the bread done." She might also cradle it sometimes like sculpture-and she will prune the plants gently to make them lush and "they flower." She takes joy in country blossoms-but Celebrations

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he has his very different ways. "I tell you this / because when you bake / you treat dough as enemy" (89). She tells him this also because when he tends plants he pulls out "living leaves with the dead" and he administers water "sparingly, as if / it saps your life fluid." Is this a bake-off or a battle of the poets about how and when and when not to revise? Following the concentric circles, the opening confessional, and the serenity and reassurance of the love poems, Martin positions six new contrapuntals as a prelude to his experimentation with a wide variety of poetic structures. "Contrapuntal Piece NO.9" strikes the half-hearted promise made throughout this volume "never to make music again" (20). The two speakers banter back and forth about the desperation of winter love, the hungers of the body, dreams about imprisoning the soul, and how we can"count all objective things." Back and forth-counterpoint style depending on the order in which one reads-these speakers tear each other up: There is no beginning except with truth I am a thief born remarkably into hell Gradually, an animal becomes the body it has devoured. (20) "Contrapuntal No. 10" is less brutal, although it does suggest that the path to truth flies with Icarus. Dedicated "In Memoriam, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)," the poem begins, "Truth like the sun will burn you if you stand too close" and ends, "Drop by drop, dripping water measures time" (21). This one can be read both up and down in both columns, and every direction underscores the passing of time and the inevitability of death: "All men move specific in time / As man must surely die" (21). "Contrapuntal No. 12" is a shorter contrapuntal where each speaker has only four lines and they repeat the shared line "Let the body absorb the shocks" (22). One speaker concludes, "the heart is an emotional fact"; the other could be overlay rather than juxtaposition: "The moon will hear you utterly" (22). "Contrapuntal No. 13"is a collage of darkness, terror, and devastation, with echoing shadows in counterpoint. Some interesting combinations can be read down the columns: "When the door of morning reason opens / So quickly does the shadow retreat that / I am not likely to learn where the night went" (23). Or: "I am not likely to learn where the night went / I am not likely to discover where the rain goes / Beneath certain darkness where no light fell / This night was all the shadow of the moon" (23). A floating line can segue in either direction and for either speaker: "I know what terrors I have wrestled with" (23). The possibilities are many, and at least for a while in this collection the music takes precedence over the visible language. 116

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The last two contrapuntals in this collection move in very different directions. "Contrapuntal No. 14" is a formal invitation to "comfortably question / What it is that supports the waters of the world" (24). In a liturgical pattern of ritual each speaker enacts possible answers. "Our naked testimony is a chalice for time," one proposes in counterpoint to the other's question. "What is the cap that contains the miracle of breath?" They come to agree that at least "we seek the same answers." In mutual reassurance they agree, "Smile do not hesitate," because it is a dream world where we are the principal actors and "the earth is the altar whereon we may rest" (24). "Contrapuntal No. IS" is the most colloquial of the contrapuntals, dedicated "For: My Students, 1977," and intended no doubt to show the more skeptical among them that the contrapuntal genre need not be so elite as they might suspect. "My dears, it's nothing to me / I make use of what I see," the speaker begins in snappy fashion. His counterpoint partner speaks in the same jaunty tone in a call that begins in jazz and turns mock epic: "Hey, benefactor old man of the people / In the absence of a formal definition / the art of declamation / Which the author knows, like the shadow / The working competence of men / They will suffer no sense of defeat" (25). Juxtaposed or intermingled, the left-side speaker is countering: "The military has expressed interest in / The secret ability to cloud men's minds / They pin their faith to material interests." The contrasts build between two speakers who never seem to connect. "Contrapuntal No. IS" is unique as the only contrapuntal poem with a title: "At This Point in Time." That phrase is nowhere repeated in either monologue, though it could be inserted anywhere in either speech. The effect is to playfully poke fun at the pseudoprecision and the perfunctory fussiness of both speakers. Here is how they conclude, and readers can start and end their conclusions anywhere: There is no doubt that sooner or later That's so universal as to lose significance (In the maintenance of reducing down time) More perhaps by inference than by definition That procedure must give insight by design. (25) Are we reading class notes for a professor's lecture? An operation manual? A troubleshooter's guidebook? At least for a while here, TheFormsofSilence gets a little noisy, and the possibilities for performance are again invited. Much of The Forms of Silence is devoted to formal experimentation with the sonnet, octave, sestina, and the creation of visible patterns reminiscent of the poetesconcrete. "Sonnet: The Expanse of Memory" stitches early thoughts Celebrations

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into a quilt of love and commitment: "That month, that September, everything was memory" until the poet awakens one day to take the "road away from solitary" to "piece together / Sure courage and choose feelings." Mem0ry and words and the creation of his poem begin the healing stitchery: "The way I hem, design, there shall be no / Disguise. Simply, your love's strength was thread taut" (35). "Ten Variations on a Walk" works with the imagist manifestos, Pound's advice, Wallace Stevens's "blackbird," and Martin's friend Raymond Patterson's "26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man." In a sequence that moves from "0" to "IX," the speaker records a series of walks at night and at dawn, through winter's snow, through memory and passion, and across the page to the written word: "When I am done with morning walking / I return to my private dwelling" and a challenge for the reader: "Look there / Through air / Where / Lovers pair / Flesh and heart / Sigh and starts / Quickly, / Can you read the words written there?" (52). In another experiment with visual structure, "Once There Was a Stoned Fox" is a twenty-eight-line poem (one word per line) set up in a linear pattern rather than across with line-break signals as here: Who caught men individual between a few words and the simple moves of her body This poem is not-though perhaps it could be-a contrapuntal: "Those / who / considered / themselves / lucky / ever / after / lived / happily / only / for / that / moment" (45). The play on "lucky ever after" followed by "happily" and the title functioning in the first line are part of the fun of this poem. It is no doubt more than coincidence that Martin's structural innovations at

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this point are inspired at least in part by Robert Hayden's "The Diver," a poem that also makes the title part of the first sentence, "Sank through easeful azure," and makes its shape match the action with the diver's deepening descent building finally to his concluding "measured rise." Martin saw in Hayden's poem a structurally symbolic effort to be oneself. He saw the speaker as not only "intrigued by death" but also down so long "that he can do nothing at the end of the poem except begin his rise" (HWMP). Above all Martin admired his mentor's use of structural innovation to create in readers the sense of inevitability. He hoped that in Forms of Silence he would use and modify poetic forms and conventions to achieve that same kind of rightness. "Sestina: Lines to An Unknown Suicide" is the most ambitious foray of this volume into visual design and formal complexity. The sestina originated as a Provencal poem with six-line stanzas followed by an envoi, a short concluding stanza, of three lines. The concluding words of the first stanza would be repeated throughout the poem using various kinds of cross-shaped inversions. Aurally the effect creates a tightly knit pattern of echoing refrains not exactly repeated but laced throughout. At the same time, the cruciate structure allows for a crisscross pattern of counterpoint not unlike the counterpoint effects of the contrapuntal. Consider the all-important first stanza: They speak vicariously of your personal history That you took a gun in hand and pulled its spring, Allowed a single bullet in your brain free access Through its rigid and confined corridor To absent you from foe: new, old, close, far, To set you steady like the course to the nearest star. (29) Each of the six end-of-line words-history, spring, access, corridor, far, staris repeated throughout the rest of the poem with"cruciate retrogration" or crisscrossed inversions. The poem deals with the consequences of the suicide, the questions raised, and ways in which the living will endure. The successive variations create sharp contrasts, multiple viewpoints, surprising complementariness, and many images of various types of presence and absence. Here is one of the five repetitions and inversions: They took you away; now no one has access To you. Do you wander like the light of a star Infinitely down the sky, space's only corridor? In some deep and private way I touch your history

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Time has advanced beyond the end of that spring Where is your mature spirit; has it gone far? (29) The six stanzas involve readers in ways very like what is invited or demanded in the contrapuntal. Readers get to choose various versions of what is happening or take in a composite of different perspectives. They might also play with the order of how events are sequenced, and in the end widely varying effects are achieved through the same rhythms and the same words. While the concluding envoi is only half as long, again all six words still haunt the premises: This winter's history is still; we take to spring There is no true access to freedom through this corridor It is long and far; we take guidance from any star. (30) The suicide victim is still unknown. The entrapment of the suicide is reinforced by the claustrophobic patterns of repetition. Are we hearing the same thing? Are the same words rolling into different meanings? Can the contrapuntal positioning of stanzas be rearranged? Are the dazzling effects mere showmanship or a path to perception? The suicide sestina sets up a series of poems questioning, fearing, celebrating, and attempting to transcend death. "On Alexander Calder Dying" is a speaker's urgent request that at the moment he dies" Softly, say goodbye; Let be" (37). In the letting be, he hopes not to be pursued, prolonged, delayed, disturbed. "Death Is a Departure in Love" recalls the day the poet's friends told him his Cousin Louise had died: "They argued the truth; I didn't believe them" (41). She was dead and funeral preparations began: emptying, cleaning, airing ("How quickly cleaning confirms death"). The structure in this poem tucks the memories of Cousin Louise's funeral into a frame of present urgency. The opening line announces: "I am patiently waiting for you to leave," and the conclusion resolves: "So, when you are gone, Friend, / I shall vacuum the room, / Rearrange the desk and bed, / Scrub all the places you have touched, / Sit Shiva, / Close the period in my life / And never never look back" (41). Is hastening the inevitable a way of facing what is otherwise unbearable? There is one more chilling memory of a poet dying young in "Reading My Mail on the Spanish Steps," a recollection of opening the mail while also reading the inscription on the wall: "The Young English Poet / John Keats / Died in this House / Aged 25." The poet remembers a crack in the house lengthening "off into eternity" (47). One poem rises out of those somber death songs to sing of an earth that will still stop in its tracks, still 120

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give off "light that transports cool." It is still possible to do lots of things: to take from the wind and the moon what you can give back in touch, "to drink from the river you shall enjoy as life," to turn "what you take from the snow" into warmth: "When you breathe spring, know it is the breath of love / Learn to sing as exotic men do" ("I Sing of an Earth That Is Yet Astonishing" 43). These lines are like an uninvited but welcome guest in a book that is generally very somber, and the lines sing out where many of the poems create visible configurations. Finally, one more death poem shouts the cycles of reaffirmation in a simple, brutal, leavening image: "He let go life with courage / Fed his blood to the snow, / Everything it touched turned perfect red. / When the wind had swept away that winter / The crust of his life softened the earth" ("0 Samurai" 42). Martin's interest in historical research prompted the one lyrical ballad in this collection, "Ballad of a Fire." While he was living in Pittsburgh during 1977 and 1978 he researched a great fire that occurred on April 10, 1845, and shaped a song that begins, "In eighteen hundred and forty-five / There was a fire insidiously alive. / How it began, how it started, no one knows; / Fact disappears the older it grows" (The FormsofSilence 33). The central fact that remains-that nothing is known about how it started-becomes the refrain, and in each stanza something further disappears as time goes on. In the second stanza, "Truth disappears the older it grows"-and then in subsequent stanzas what vanishes is joy, quality, progress, patience, love, faith, and courage. The form "so full of life" was overcome by tragedies and suffocation, and ends in ruin. A measure of certainty returns at least in the enduring mythology: "Now the town lies devastated in its dream; / Pain and ruin disastrously stalk supreme. / When it ended; the exact time, everyone knows; / Myth is the final off-spring of the rose" (34). This poem highlights Martin's abiding interest in how historical events are preserved and reconstructed through the poet's myth. In December 1991 Martin returned to the composition of this ballad in a paper presented at a faculty development symposium. At the time he compared "Version I" as published in TheFormsofSilence in 1980 with two drafts of a later version. One draft begins, "In 1845 a fire visited Pittsburgh ..." and tells a similar story while introducing several characters: Malcolm Lerch, who "watched the fire atop his building," and Silbert and Jones, who opened their safe to find that their books were black flakes and "their gold and silver melted together" (manuscript drafts in HWMP). This version chronicles as well the pestilence that followed the fire and ends with a sentiment echoing the earlier refrain: "Come my people, / Let us set aside this day / Fast with humility and prayer / keep it quietly and solemnly / for why this Celebrations

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visitation has come upon us / No one pretends to know." This draft then became "The Washerwoman's Fire," written in 1991, where the story is told from the point of view of a resident who was celebrating his seventh birthday on the day of the fire. "My immigrant mother cooked her white clothes alive," he begins. Then he quotes a person who sounds very like that collective voice of MyMother'sVoice: "You must wipe the dirt / From your clothes if you want them to be clean." This narrator does have a theory about the cause of the fire: "On my natal day / June 6,1845, a spark ... caught a ride / On a delicate piece of paper." Memories of his seventh birthday recall in terror "what a sudden, sudden ordering that fire made of the Southtown" (HWMP). These three versions of the Pittsburgh fire highlight many dimensions of Martin's work in the eighties and nineties. His interest in historical research prompted not only several historical narratives but led him as well to the discovery of lost and unpublished manuscripts by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Telling the stories from many different angles was consistent with Martin's pursuit of counterpoint and juxtaposed perspectives throughout his career. Performing historical characters was also a logical outgrowth of his training as a playwright and his experience as an actor and performer of poetry. Martin brings TheFormsof Silence full circle by concluding with a series of love poems. "Light" returns to the romancing of his wife. The setting is simple. When they met she was sitting in the light of a candle: "I saw the flame / In your eyes / and thought / what a challenge they gave / to the light" (49). Perhaps "challenge" is multifaceted, ambiguous, equivocalbut this does seem to be the stuff of romance. Or how about another poem allegedly about two other lovers seated on a stairwell whispering to each other "as if driven by the impulse to sing." The speaker's heart stops, he goes away, and he comes back to find them still there. Could this really be about two poets who recently met, courting? "I take out my keys / the door swings welcome / as if to receive the light," he recalls: "the two are still there / tasting the wonder of personal/words" ("Opus 2, NO.2: The Impulse to Sing" 59). For the new family created on that wedding date in 1979 here is "Snow" (dedicated to Sue's daughter, who was eight years old at its publication, "For: Sarah"). Great clouds of snow melt on the poet's tongue. Inhaled air causes him to fly off to feel the sky, absorbing water and floating "marvelously away." The cycle is celebrated. "The wind and I race until we are exhausted," proclaims the new husband-father. He becomes a cloud, falls back "reassembled" to the ground. What goes up must come down, and "I am" in the end at last again "a solid blanket filled with stars" (53). Finally, the family motif comes into full swing with the sentiments and the mood of "When Constellations Conjoin." It simmers: "Legend has it that 122

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when / Constellations conjoin; / dogs have it tough in Tucson; / Wolves scent the terror / of something wounded in the desert." But with all the fears and howling, cautions and pain, still "Love invades the body, / takes captive the human heart ... like the swing of a lullaby" (57). Shortly after TheForms ofSilence appeared, Martin's professional and personal schedules became busier than they had ever been. Teaching full-time at the University of Dayton, he also appeared in plays, performed his Dunbar show, and squeezed in readings of his own works. At home he had a new family: his wife and two daughters, one a baby. His mother, who had had a stroke on Easter Monday, 1965, lived in Toledo and in ill health. He wrote several poems and a short story ("A Hard Trip," HWMP) about journeying regularly on 1-75 to his mother's house. He continued to also collaborate with musicians Joseph Fennimore and Philip Magnuson-partnerships that led to what he would call his "new career" as an opera librettist in the 1990S. He also followed up on the monograph about Dunbar with research that led to important discoveries of Dunbar manuscripts (see chapters 8 and 9, which follow). Several reviews Martin wrote between 1978 and 1987 indicate the directions he thought African American poetry would be taking at the time and provide clues about his own long-range goals. Commenting on Lance Jeffers's a Africa, Where I Baked My Bread, he noted that by the mid-iozos "leading writers of the sixties (agree or disagree, their names are well known) are concerning themselves with domestic matters, history, humor, and lyricism that love has afforded every poet since the first one set pen to paper" (107). Jeffers, he notes, is an eloquent spokesperson for the new directions. His poems "have the power to repel and attract at the same time" (108). He is "father, healer, and wisdom-figure" (109). Gwendolyn Brooks's To Disembark comes in for similar praise. "It may be said that Gwendolyn Brooks gained a new sense of vitality when the angry sixties erupted in our consciousness, and whether she joined that movement, gave substance to it, or took substance from it, she was strong and gifted enough to survive the 'hangers on" (109). Brooks was also strong enough, Martin notes, to write in "colloquial speech" and survive "our academic snobbishness" about it. Three years later, he praises Alvin Aubert for no longer leading black poets out on a journey of essential loneliness. "Black poetry of the sixties gifted us with a renewed sense of self-investigation but left us to do the journeying on our own" (348). In his earlier works and in South Louisiana: New and Selected Poems (1986), Aubert is inventive and inexhaustible: his work "projects a genuine and lasting music through which we are permitted to observe gestures of feeling as well as gestures of art" (348). Celebrations

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From what he at least implies in these reviews, Martin himself wanted to avoid being pigeonholed with the people who were well known. It is clear also that he tried to avoid becoming any kind of hanger-on and that he appreciated and benefited from the new community of black poets who would no longer have to go it alone on an often solitary journey. Martin survived by joining and contributing to a new community of black poets while he continued to avoid all fads and factions. He grew through his combination and counterpointing of multiple artistic forms. In the mideighties his diverse interests and goals prepared the way for new directions in his teaching, scholarship, poetry, and partnership with musicians. Coming together in 1986 were two very different projects: his work as coeditor of the special issue of DerRabe on African American poets and his planning of the Emily Dickinson Centennial Celebration in Dayton. Martin spent much of 1986 planning the Dickinson Centennial. Fourteen years after the Dunbar Centennial, poets and scholars gathered in Dayton once again, this time to honor a poet whose personal life would seem even less suited to a party atmosphere. Months of planning involved what Martin would later call the "speculation, daring, endless correspondence, mix ups, sickness and unavoidable changes in plans" that would at last be worthwhile ("A Few Epistles" 4). Hoping that a variety of approaches would be represented at the celebration, he wrote to his participants asking them to remember that all events would be "open to the general public as well as the academic community" (letters in HWMP). Once again the festivities began with a marathon reading of Dickinson's works-an evening when, Martin observed, we simply allowed her "words to take their place, naturally, in the air" ("Epistles" 3). The evening also premiered Ellen Jane Lorenz Porter's setting of the poem "Bring Me the Sunset in a Cup," sung by soprano Dee Lane and accompanied by James C. Dill. Two full days of discussion followed on twenty scholarly papers on Dickinson's life and words. A performance of William Luce's TheBelle ofAmherst by Jean Linzee from the Stony Brook School concluded the festivities on Saturday evening. Martin also contributed to the festivities his own "Fragment for Emily Dickinson," written after his visit to the Dickinson House in Massachusetts. "The house could not be aroused," he recalls: "Only a lone meticulous gardener / Sculpts the bushes and lawn. / The landmark is closed to strangers." The gardener tells him, "You are allowed a curtained presentment"-and then goes on "pruning in the fierce presence / Of that sepulchral white house" (manuscript in HWMP). Although at least one university press initially expressed interest in publishing the collected papers, plans fell through, and six of the presenters 124

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published their works elsewhere. Martin secured rights to the fourteen unpublished papers and guest edited a special issue of the University ofDayton Review over a year later. In his introduction, "A Few Epistles from the World," he wrote "Dear Miss Dickinson ... I come bringing you this packet of fourteen essays. They are letters to you from the world" (3). Setting out to "correct some of the omissions of your century and ours," Martin offered these testimonies to "your exhilarations and loneliness, your doubts and faith, your pleasures and pains" (3). Martin's tribute to Dickinson reflects his own achievements and aspirations at this point in his career. He felt exhilaration in his teaching, in the rediscovery of Dunbar, in his own publications, and-as always-in performances where his main goal was always to make works sound and feel natural to his audiences. In his continuous efforts to bring together diverse legacies influencing contemporary poetry, Martin participated as well in a symposium honoring the achievements of the Enlightenment-era African American poet Phillis Wheatley. In September 1984 he met at Illinois State University with scholars Henry Louis Gates [r., Richard K. Barksdale, Erlene Stetson, William H. Roberson, and Raymond Patterson to examine Wheatley's achievements. At the same time he was at work on a long-range project to edit a special issue of DerRabe, a journal published in Zurich, Switzerland, to be devoted to African American poets. He worked for over a year on the project with colleagues Erlene Stetson and Raymond Patterson, hoping to afford valued exposure abroad to younger poets especially. "Black Raven, 1986" was announced on the topic of "Afro-American Literature and Culture." DerRabe, under contributing editor Fritz Senn, intended to "provide a platform for different, contradictory or extreme views for describing or illustrating the world" (press release on DerRabe, HWMP). Martin's goal was consistent with the editor's intent to "present new contemporary writers alongside the classics (established ones or those in need of rediscovery)." It was not to happen. This time all the efforts, correspondence, negotiation, selection, and editing would not reach fruition. Because of some undisclosed personal reasons not related to the material solicited and readied for publication, the contributing editor canceled the project. In a note accompanying manuscript materials Martin says that all manuscripts, cartoons, and art work were sent to DerRabe in May 1986 (HWMP). Martin, Patterson, and Stetson had no contract and no recourse: "The magazine ultimately took no responsibility for the disappearance of the original work" (note dated January 31, 1998, HWMP). In the mideighties Martin turned increasingly to community activities and family matters, concerns that dominated his schedule and new poems Celebrations

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of the time. His wife taught classes in a variety of venues in or near Dayton, and they shared many parenting responsibilities. For a while his performing engagements stayed closer to home and included appearances at schools, post offices, and libraries, the Paul Laurence Dunbar Reading Circle, Jack and Jill of America, Poetry and Fiction in Smith Gardens at Wright State University, Poetry in the Park, Chautauqua '88, and Public Poetry: Voices and Visions. Such appearances were in keeping with his commitment to widening the audiences for poetry and reflected as well some of the newer interests developing in a performer who was also now a father to daughters who were thirteen and six. On September 19,1985, "Julia's Day" (noted on the letter heading), Martin wrote: "I am trying to write a children's musical, who knows where this will lead?" (letter to the author, September 19, 1985). He was also at work on several children's books including The ABC Jungle Book for toddlers, the more advanced Alphabetical Animal, Mineral, Vegetable, as well as Can You Make This Sound? Mother Goose's Children, and Things That Say:A Picturebook. "Child Care" is a short poem that points to the intersection of Martin's personal and professional concerns at this time. "There is something / tedious about / babysitting," he suggests-"unless you can / teach the baby / table-tennis, / show him or her / the magic of a rebounding / pong that possesses / a spirit descending / like twilight / like Christ coming / for a second time" (in manuscript, HWMP). Earlier in 1985 he completed an unpublished manuscript of Chasing the Wind, a volume exploring many new subjects for this new stage of his life. "Turning Around" records a series of domestic scenes and family events: "My wife who loves birds must not know this one / which fell creating an ecstasy by its flight / Flew into her viewing window and broke its neck." While the poet is routinely raking leaves ("continual and necessary work"), the neighbor's dog alerts him to "some invisible / pain the air holds."5 He worries too that conflicts in the town might invade his private house. Does the dog hear the postwoman coming or does it warn of"some larger calamity / That involves the world?" The poem suggests that even dogs barking and leaves falling do not escape the gaze and ear of the working poet. In "A Child's Question" about "what is snow," the mother responds "flaked wind" or "air that whispers a frozen tale" and again "sky dust" and "the correct / offspring of brilliance and shade." "Dark dying woman / time goes badly" echos Final W Poems: The Cancer Files. "Chasing the Wind," the title poem of the volume, commemorates Uncle Jay Bird, who bicycled backwards as he astounded the neighbors "chasing the wind / like a world wonder / escaping all his mortal errors." In "Kite Flying," the poet and his daughter go looking for wind in February, "too early for kite flying." She will learn about 126

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Herbert Woodward Martin , Fulbright Fellow, readingfrom his own works in Koposva r, Hungary, spring 1991. Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Martin.

"control, the exhilaration of ascent, of sudden fall from / Gaining too much height, how one must naturally give and take / While bending through narrow corridors of air." But these are a father 's lessons that do not "trouble or inform. " She is more impressed by the wind, the breathing, the string that allows attachment that "can still break free of prisons. " "On Julia's Birth" contrasts death as the time "no man can instruct about" with a time for "growing," another to "claim your own vision," another yet when "the vision which guides me / is love. " Finally, in "M y Wife Entices Me ," water ha s "tw ice now " ine xplicably "turned itself / on in the bathtub." The poet resists his wife's urgency to "speak of / ghosts, of unexpected visions." It is enough to conclude that "light does not explain everything, / nor does the night confirm all that which is / rattlingly mysterious. " These and other poems in the collection reflect a Wordsworthian sense of everyday life in scenes of family and domestic chores. Chasing th e Wind remains an unpublished manuscript, and Martin moved some of the poems to other collections, such as Galileo's Suns and South ern Voices (in progress). In 1988 Lotus Press published A Milestone Sampler: istb Anniversary Anthology, which features five new poems by Martin including "Kite Flying" (written for Chasing th e Wind) and "The Washerwomen's Fire" (the revised Celebrations

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version of the story based on the Pittsburgh fire). In addition, "Dressing" is reprinted from The Forms of Silence and "Georgia O'Keefe" pays tribute to the artist Martin admired. In "Memory Is the Braille the Wind Leaves," called by one reviewer, "one of the most moving poems in the collection," the poet is awakened by a terrifying early morning phone call announcing the death of a friend. The speaker resolves to comfort his friend's spouse: "It was a cold February that I wrapped and braced you against. Yours was an unfathomable pain. It ate the flesh from the inside. Your eyes had a deeper sense; they looked beyond our simple actions. Those dark eyes worked to read the braille the wind leaves." In the end, the living mourn the loss and regroupwith no assurances or safeguards against pain: "We were left to our own human rescue. We went back to where we began: home, and tried to think how we could begin again" (94). This chilling poem from the Milestone Sampler aptly concludes a bittersweet decade of pain and new life, of celebrations and new directions. Around the corner for Martin was another milestone in his performing career: a video production of his Dunbar one-man show. At this point he was becoming the poet he wrote about a decade earlier in the poem "At This Time"-a poet who began to construct a world in the midst of a field where "crops of one kind or another might grow" (Silence 26). Slowly he seeds "deeply the earth with certain words." He will "strew row by line" with words chosen from his "plastic seed bag." The seeds of the eighties did blossom later into two very new and different directions. In one field the scholar would harvest lost plays and poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. In another field the opera librettist would move into song cycles, oratorios, and operas as the counterpoint artist continued to find new contrasts and new combinations.

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Reclaiming History The Logof the Vigilante and The Last Days of William Short

The centerpiece of Martin's career, TheLogofthe Vigilante (2000), is at once the fruition of his earlier work and an indication of the new directions in which he is headed. TheLogevolved over time. Excerpts from the narrative in progress were published in the early seventies. The first full version, "History: The Log of the Vigilante," appeared in Obsidian: BlackLiterature inReview in 1976. He then wrote what would be additions to The Log and published them separately over the next ten years. In the early nineties he created a new prose section of the work, and then he blended the prose selections in with the earlier poems and added several new sections. The expanded text won first prize in the Mellen Narrative Poetry Competition in 1999. In its range of characters and settings, as well as the complexity of its forms, The Log embodies the variety in Martin's entire artistry stretching back over four decades. Accompanied by a wide range of music from the oral tradition, the narrative gives voice to slaves and their descendants. Martin juxtaposes a fictional slave-ship captain and a series of historical personages in contrapuntal patterns that invite debate. The Log is a producerly text that encourages questioning participation and possible resultant closure from audiences who learn to read the waters. Angry protest counterpoints soft love poems. The musical rhythms and themes run deliberately contrary to each other for effect. The work is meant to be performed, but it also reads like a history book. The evolution of counterpoint ingredients looks back to his playwriting days and ahead to his achievements as an opera librettist and Paul Laurence Dunbar scholar. In a similar historical tribute closer to home, Martin also commemorated as well the life of a dishwasher who contracted AIDS after being shot in a robbery (The LastDaysof William Short, HWMP).

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The historical documents and voices introduced in The Log represent a wide range of chroniclers who reclaim a history that has been forgotten or distorted. A host of witnesses speak in the poem: the keepers of the logs on slave ships and plantations, slaves, and overseers as well as puzzled and conflicted slave owners. Their venues and genres are diverse. We listen to spirituals and work songs, interviews with runaway slaves, and passages from slave narratives. We read wanted posters, letters, and found poems. We overhear the sounds of the auction block. Because all these perspectives are complex, problematic, and often conflicted, contrapuntal patterns of arrangement prompt readers to think their way through the journey. Aboard the Vigilante, Martin's main character is Galileo, Captain of the Invisible V, who listens to the slaves as they drum what they knew of themselves and somehow understands the old rhythms and the "sorrow, which every song must have."! TheLogfollows several organizational patterns overlaid on the sequential record hour-by-hour report of the captain's diary. Several voices relate the stories. Preeminently there is Captain Galileo, who writes a straightforward record of what he observes and raises the torturous questions he faces about the slaves' suffering, the assaults on their humanity, and the evil he suspects to be at the core of his commodification of human flesh. In each hourly entry, readers confront the ironies raised by Galilee's puzzlement. Seldom do more that a half dozen entries go by without song: slave songs, blues, spirituals, and jive. Like the typological prefiguring of future history in Milton's Paradise Lost, multiple narrators emerge in The Log to tell the stories from colonial days to the present. Survivors return with their songs and stories of endurance. The spirit of long-dead slaves and the enduring presence of their songs provide comfort. Narrators and readers alike learn to read the lessons in the waters, and in the end the messages are of hope, forgiveness, and growth. A journey that begins smelling the blood and feeling the bones of ancestors in the sea reconstructs the history that has brought us separately and together to where we now must live. As former slaves rewrite the history of slavery, readers hear the sorrow songs and spirituals of hope. Through times even when we lose all connection, readers piece together the patchwork quilt of insight trying to understand what forgiveness could possibly mean. While people can be killed, ideas cannot. The long and winding reclaiming process ends with an old woman, sitting on a porch with memories passing through her mind and a whispering wind saying, "I am a wanderer no longer" (113). In the end the somber lessons of TheLog teach hope and the deepest sense of joy. In the format of the diary kept by the ship's captain, Galileo, Martin presents the history of not only one voyage but the experiences and psy130

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chology of slavers and slaves alike. The original version begins, "And they drummed steadily what they knew of themselves"-inviting readers immediately into an unfolding diary and signaling that knowledge is recorded in the pulses and absorbed through the bones (Log, 1976 version; Obsidian 58). This is a story of captivity where thieves tear a people from their own soil and rip"quick from the bone" until, when the anger of the captives will not subside, they are burned and scattered "to wind and sea" (58). The narrator is a conflicted captain who shares in open confession with the reader "all the white deeds of my private heart and the emblazoned red ones of my thought" (Log, 2000, 1). Beginning in 1715 when he was "impressed into a slaver's life" (1), Galilee's years impress upon his memory the steady drumming, the screams and silences, the rhythms of responsibility: "That pulse is the beat of history, / That sound the melody of pain. All their loss is my heritage / Precious interest paid for my age" (Obsidian 58). He recalls the sharp contrasts of slavers "all white ... [with] eyes the color of sea water" who "maneuvered those black figures to our sweet wills." Some slaves "so unfamiliar with pain that they chose not to endure" attempted to escape amidst sharks, choosing freedom of death by water to "ropes that churned." But the record shows that slavers would restock their supplies by buying others from their sworn enemies: "an easy sale, sold away in perfect silence" alongside the captain's utterances in "a tongue that had never been comprehended" (1). Galilee's log records events as they occurred and comments self-reflexively on his own involvement. History is, he says, "a relay" where "memory is passed on to the next runner" (3)-and the poem directs attention to how each runner handles that trust. The Log looks to the messages drummed by slaves, the waters that hold their deaths, and the memories preserved in the diary in an effort to hear wisdom in the "subtle silence" that will otherwise remain a curse. The recorded memories alternate between what the captain wants to confess and the ironies that fully escape his comprehension. "I hear the old drums. 1listen to the old rhythms, to the old pains," he proclaims, in what becomes a refrain of his account (2). "0, where are their roots, where their land? / Who feels their pulse, where flows their blood," he asks, "What secrets do these waters hold? / What narratives do they tell?" (Obsidian 58). The pulse shared by slave and slaver is "the beat of history" and can be felt through the drums, the memories, and the stories. Martin's narrator begins with daily accounts of the movements of the ship and then juxtaposes quotations from slave auction billboards, lyrics of the spirituals, Thomas Jefferson's notes for the Declaration of Independence, reward posters for runaway slaves, and proclamations from David Walker's Reclaiming History

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Appeal. Blended by the jazz tempos of the poem, these assembled contrasts underscore the ironies that the narrator is confronting. While Spain attempted to populate the New World "with black flesh stolen at random" (5), Thomas Jefferson complained of George Ill's "execrable commerce" in a "market where men should be bought and sold" (6). To that same Jefferson, who kept twenty-nine slaves at Monticello, Galileo says: "You took their joy; burdened their liberty / And let them die" (7). The Log moves swiftly from the steady speaking of the drums and the sound of painful moans that move "effortlessly through water like a fish" to the boastful tricksterlike slaver struggling with what history remembers: "I bought me a blackman / Purchased a light brown woman / And a black manchild too" (8). One example shows how order was kept throughout the journey: "We made fast our most offensive captives / We laced them by their four limbs upon their stomachs / Then we lashed their backs for human faults / Then covered them in brine and gun powder / A generous reminder that no white man / Would tolerate rebellious ways" (11). And so much of the open protest hung in the wind or was buried with sharks, as the music became sadder, softer, and closer to Jesus. The ship continues to keep that music alive even as it becomes more difficult to hear or understand. Henceforth the songs become necessarily more convoluted, more coded for the generations to come: "Take this song, / release it in the air / A mighty people has suffered much / To give you song" (12). The strategies for survival and the songs that teach their lessons are many and complex. There is first a legacy of escape: "Call her Mary, call her Sue / She knew Lord, what she had to do. / Run, Lord, run through the pines / Until she set her body free" (13). There is also the diverse legacy of learning how to read, write, reach, and sing: "If I learn to add / If I learn to multiply / I'll subtract from slavery / Until the day I die" (14). From the middle passage to the auction block and in spirituals and shouts, the men and women who are advertised, traded, and sold hold on to a vision of freedom: "You got to moan sometimes / Have a good prayer on your tongue / The road is rough, it may be narrow too / You go to expect the wind and rain / And the cleansing fire too / You have got to be made of righteous stuff / Because this old life is rough enough" (23). Galilee's log is a record of all these ways of surviving-and more. In the ironies of his own tormented memories he listens for men, women, and children singing of the sorrows of human terror. Into his own diary of daily events he mixes the songs and prayers, the beat of the drums, and the historical documents that reconstruct experiences that refused to drown but survive even the raging sea. Ultimately survival depends upon standing on the shoulders of those who for genera132

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tions journeyed forth into the terrors of the night to endow their ancestors with freedom. The eloquence of David Walker's Appeal brings The Log full circle to read the steady drumming messages of anger, courage, and certain knowledge. Emerging from the recesses of the auction block, Walker proclaims that the truth of the American Constitution will house ideals in the blood and give breath to freedom. "You are not born to suffer / The dark wills of other men," he says. "Stand and dare the future" (30). Freedom lives through Walker's appeal and in the strong yet quiet closing scene of "01700" that celebrates the healing power of special roots passed from generation to generation, "Mother said: 'Not all sickness is in the blood.' / She taught me secret ways to gain my strength again" (31). Through layers of irony, Galileo is tormented by guilt and by his own inability to understand the narratives he records. He has some hunches about the "special roots" that are preserved, but he knows full well that secrets must be kept from him because, as he hears, "I ain't telling what kind / I got plenty enough sense to know you'd steal that recipe / Like you stole freedom from our bodies, but not our minds, not our minds" (Log, 1976; Obsidian 67). Martin leaves Galileo with that dilemma: he hears and sees and almost feels the knowledge captivity created. He is driven back into memory, and he collects the historical records, songs, artifacts, proclamations, constitutions, and appeals. In the end, the narrator of The Log is left with a construction of his own making: a brooding complex achievement but an account limited nonetheless by his own efforts to make sense of the story. In presenting a dramatic collagelike cluster of varied documents, Martin invites readers to participate in the construction of the history they will take away. Like so many of his works, The Log reads like a script to be performed. His readers are brought into a theater-not exactly on the outside looking in, but more seated on the stage to accompany another sailing of the Vigilante. We are part of a musical, an operatic history of a people as it gets remembered, restored, and preserved. We are members of the relay team. Through Galilee's confusions we are reminded of the insurmountable ironies. Like the multiple speakers of Martin's contrapuntal poems, the juxtaposed documents of The Log clash and harmonize; like the steady drumming of the captives, we come to hear whatever part of the secrets we are ready to understand. The Logof the Vigilante is a contrapuntal mix of speeches, written documents, and musical forms. The poem juxtaposes time sequences and points of view where narrator, speaker, and audience gloss each other on a quest to remember, learn, and understand. The work is part prose poem, part musical lyrics, and part found poems and collections of stories to be interpreted. Gallieo ReclaimingHistory

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mediates between readers and the text he assembles. He listens along with us to the drums, the spirituals, the slave songs and shouts, and the chants of the auctioneers. He reads for us from his own log, from Thomas Jefferson, from reward posters, and from David Walker. All this is assembled and arranged to the rhythms of jazz, blues, and street jingles. The sounds are moans and the drift of liquid: wind and sea, rain, storms, blood flowing. The impression finally is conflict, confusion, and uncertainty. All through The Log, the narrator struggles to construct meaning out of contradictions and senseless suffering. The first few pages of the expanded Log (2000) are in prose. In this new version Galileo-captain of the ship, keeper of the diary, maker of historyprovides a preface for his readers. He is both confessional and equivocal; he claims to pour out his soul to let the horrors speak for themselves, and yet he cannot understand the record of his own making. He is callous and brutal, mercenary in his motives and in his accounting of the merchandise. Yet in his most graphic recollections of nonchalant trafficking in violence, he is haunted by the drumming of his prisoners, the silence of their anger, and the terrible songs of their sorrow. He is ironic at every turn where death is both imposed order and the release of an achieved freedom. While he is a historian, he looks ahead as well to the lives his cargo will lead. He worries about the secrets held by the water and the wind, and he moves away from his introduction of himself to step aside so that other voices might speak. Graciously, out of torment, and always with irony, he looks to the "shaded community of men, women, and children singing the sorrow of guns, whips, sharks, and human terror" (4). Galilee's written chronicle begins at 0000 hours with the ships of Spain setting out "to populate the New World with free labor, / With black flesh stolen at random" (5). Robbed, struck, disappearing, gliding through the waves, the time moves forth over a four-day ledger with all the lurid details and puzzling gaps of history being restored. He moves back to events in 1715 and then ahead to Jefferson's slaves at Monticello, to the deleted clause of "the proposal of freedom," and the slave-ship captain's voicing of century-old contradictions: "Why should I praise equality?" (6). Immediately the narrative stance breaks out into a wide variety of voices that authenticate and complicate everything being explored. At 0200 a jaunty jive "I bought me a blackman" sails hauntingly off into repeated "To make them work and make them pay" (7), and the next hour's "Reward Poster" promising rewards for the forcible return of "An ordinary man / Trying to make his escape" (9). A quick succession of Galilee's nightmares bursts in from time to time. He is haunted by the violence, tells his readers never to forget what he wants to erase from his own memory, describes in grizzly detail 134

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the treatments saved for the most "offensive" captives and marvels at the tenacity, the horror, and the music that has emerged from the suffering. Those songs appear early and late: the jazzy tempo of escape songs, the determination of the work songs, the intricate plans and overwhelming trust of the spirituals. The captives are tossed overboard and their descendants later escape, rebuild, forgive, and somehow celebrate. The drums strut forth sounds, and joy eats the earth. Like transitions in cinematic spectacle, The Log sprawls out into auction scenes where men, women, and children are" dealt with at leisure," where a five-year-old son is tossed into a deal for a good washerwoman, and where the marketing of merchandise is treated as jive: "Here we have a trio / James, Linda, and Mattie Lou / Obedient, wise and loving too: / They're a fine combination; / They'll do whatever you tell them to" (26). Alternately somber and irreverent, the narrator penetrates through to playful brutality, disregard of human dignity, the double insults of people marketed to look like really good merchandise: first-rate listeners who are hard working and temperate and see how "rapidly they perform." They will never be late, they are a team and a family and on sale yet: "Aren't they better than they seem?" (27). What might be called the telemarketing section of TheLogcould be right at home in e-commerce. "They Are Never Late," one ad shouts. "For the Domestically Discriminating," another entices: "Special needs we fulfill them." All kinds of servants available: "field hands, cooks, house maids, man servants, washers and ironers, stable boys, waiters"-in a list that anticipates generations of servants and domestics yet to come: "We specialize in your dreams. / Tell us what you want, you need / We take heed; we take heed" (28). The auctioneers as dream makers undermine any thoughts that slaves as well have dreams. Martin juxtaposes the wickedest marketing ploys alongside a long succession of historical heroes-actual and mythical-running from David Walker and Sojourner Truth to Jim Crow and Aunt Jemima. Walker appeals to the best instincts of his audience ("I know you rightly to be generous men," 29) and asks that knowledge unite us in a community of truth. A slave woman the doctors had "given up for dead" is saved by special roots from one who said that they stole freedom but "couldn't take our minds" (31). This is the first prominent appearance in TheLog of Martins's collective black woman voice who always receives this kind of praise: "She taught me secret ways to gain my strength again" (31). At 02000 hours the Ouarry sails by with slaves who "lay funeral head to head, feet to feet, / Side by side with chains about their neck and ankles. / They walked once a day like rare pets being fed air" (33). The Quarry "sailed on," however, "in silence; / Neither crew nor cargo ever came to port" (33). In a particularly Reclaiming History

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brutal scene, the Log looks ahead to those photos of white men watching hangings and the prefiguring of how the middle passage journey would give way later to festive party lynch mobs: "Those white men who stood to have their picture taken for history / And the death they watched is blurred and undefined, but their / Opinion is preserved. I can not rid my ears of their cheers / Their partaking joy, the way they chose to celebrate their time / To lynch a 'boy'" (34). This reclaiming of history also resurrects a variety of larger-than-life heroes: runaways, sinners, jivers, wanderers, singers all. Some of these descendants of stolen cargo have appeared in several of Martin's earlier books: in Galileo's Suns (1999) and A Matter of Honor (2000) as well as in manuscripts in progress such as My Mother's Voice and Southern Voices (see chapters 5 and 8). The fiercely independent and larger-than-life Ace, for example, avoids the confinement of church and "too much lovin" and moves in fast circles where "he don't tick, he don't tock." Ace is a very modern folk hero, all slick sophistication and the stuff of urban legends. Sleep in too long, and he'll have the paper read before you see the daylight. And he can hustle the stock market averages with the best of them. He "hustles the tussle" and "grapples the grip." He is stable and "knows what it takes to make a home at night." He is the motion itself of survival songs: "He is vital wind, the world is his home" (36). The tributes that TheLogpays to surviving heroes are found in numerous recurring songs such as "Runaway Blues," a story of traveling a lonely road to "get out of bossman's town" (37) and the freedom train songs like "which-a-way-is this train a-going," which includes the invitation to "Sojourn with me" for "I am truth" (41). The music of survival includes as well a "Blues Piece," a prayer from a lonely woman looking for her man who was taken from her, and the "Black Man's Auction Song," which undermines the advertising songs by shifting the point of view to the product's feelings and will: "Ain't no describing the feeling in my heart / Ain't no describing the pain in my soul/Ain't no freedom on this block / Ain't no freedom on this block" (45). As Martin worked on TheLogthroughout the 1980s, he added new entries to the diaries, and he expanded stories and songs that followed the original outline. He also inserted the times of entries to create a chronology for the ship's journey, and he projected increasingly outward to the future descendants of the slaves being transported. The 1976version ended with the story of the slave woman cured by roots provided by the mother of another slave. Indirectly-through the narrator-this wise woman has the final word in the last two lines of the poem: "My mama told me not all sickness is in the blood. / She taught me all the secret ways to gain my strength again" (Obsid136

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Martin with Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis in Dayton, Septemb er 29, 1976. Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Martin.

ian 67). Throughout the next decade and a half-and primarily in two unpublished volum es, My Mother's Voice and Final W-Martin continued to let that woman have her say on the many ways of preserving, regaining, and celebrating strength. In by far the largest addition to The Log, in 1999 he incorporated about a dozen poems from My Mother's Voice. These were the po ems that empowered the vigilante's descendants by allowing the neglected to speak and inviting audiences to participate in a dialogue about how history is remembered, reconstructed, and reenacted in our present lives . The concluding passage of the 1976 Log ended the journey of the slave ship with hope and a focus on the ancestors of survivors who would preserve and pass on secret ways of being strong. In a letter to Martin praising the 1976 version, Ossie Davis remarks on how the poem "captures in little space much of the essence of the black experience. " Davis underscored the triumphant voice of the last stanza, a direction central to the additions carried over from Reclaim ing History

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MyMother'sVoice: "I am particularly fond of the very last stanza, which seems to serve as the envoi to your work-that is a sort of dedication, a climactic summary to the entire work" (May 9, 1977, HWMP). In 1999 Martin moved several blocks of texts from unpublished manuscripts into the revised and expanded Log. "Another Monday Morning" brought the admonition about rising up like Clabber Girl Baking Powder to avoid being a lazy man. "Early, early in the week," sang the jazzy blues song about paddling all night long and earning money for Saturday night, "the time to sing my song" (38). He moved "Ace" into The Log, along with Wesley Jones, known as "Chicago," and he placed them alongside David Walker and Sojourner Truth as descendants of the people who made it through the waves and whippings, who withstood the auction block to sometimes run away and to often sing the spirituals and work songs. He also brought back affreeca's letter to the president of the United States inquiring about her freedom and intermingled sermons with jive talk like "Lord look-a-there / Sleek, fast, cool, Mr. Corvair" (46). At 01100 hours Martin changed the mood of The Log to laugh-out-Ioud satire in "Obituary"-a tongue-in-cheek funeral ceremony for James Americanus Crow, known as Jim Crow, who "had a long / And devastating career / As a black-faced impersonator" (66). Along with his sideman Mr. Straightface Bones, this man they called Jim would sing and dance. The family requested a private interment presided over by the Reverend E. C. A. D. F. Africanus, pastor of the Greater Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Baptist Sanctified Presbyterian Catholic Tabernacle. This send-up is followed by a spiritual and then "Sermon," which delivers a powerful warning about the two spirits vying for our faith. In the eulogy we find out that James Americanus Crow was one of Satan's "right-hand henchmen," and together they never rest. But Jesus does provide many mansions in heaven and "He will BE the resurrection" (73). In yet another ironic commentary on the economics of the slave-ship journey, the eulogy at Jim Crow's funeral brings to a close the first book of the expanded Log by equating salvation to a savings account earning interest through delayed gratification: "So my question at this hour is simple. / Where are you banking at this hour? / When we are called to account / Who shall pay the interest? / Who shall pay the interest?" (74). With a flourish the preacher memorializes those lost during the middle passage as well as the descendants of those who somehow endured: "What survives a man are: his ideas, his thoughts, his dreams. / What survives a man are things that he does battle with: time / Fire, water, decay. / The struggle is for the spirit for the soul for the mind. The dividend is IMMORTALITY" (74). Book 1 of TheLog (2000) thus brings to a conclusion its sequence of two days ofjournal entries on a slave-ship voyage and its projected history of the 138

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struggles and triumphs of generations that are to come after them. Through a variety of songs, graphic descriptions of torture, and joyful celebrations of courage and escape, the story of a neglected past is reenacted. Again, foremost in the spirit of triumph are the poems moved from the earlier manuscript of MyMother'sVoice: the tribute to Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom, who, though much maligned, created the foundation for later achievement: "What they stood for allows you to straighten, to stand. / Inoffensive smile was deceit; liberty the deal, the game" (47). In the brilliant narrative poem "In the Evening," an old woman rocks to the lessons of history on her front porch bursting with memories and lucid insights-with no regrets and no illusions-and no fear either as she hears the "thousand voices" rising up in song and joins them. What she joins is the chorus of moans and work songs, spirituals, jazz, jive, and blues songs that are laced all through the Logculminating in the humming in the night. The strong voice of the old woman swinging on the porch reenacts Martin's counterpoint wisdom from the 1960s contrapuntals, the caustic domestic from his play TheKingDidNotApplaud, the revolutionary voice of TheShit-StormPoems, the quiet warrior pronouncements of TheForms ofSilence, the "sassy music" of Calileo 'sSuns andmost of all-the persistent, confident, optimistic insights of MyMother'sVoice and FinalW. As the epitome of Martin's counterpoint artistry, TheLogof the Vigilante makes possible a reclaiming of history because it reconstructs the lost and scattered documents of a people in flight and allows those people and their descendants to speak in their own voices. From the slaves' opening drumming to the powerful "Elder's Valedictory" that closes the volume, readers are invited to search for the lessons in the ironies of a text that reads back upon itself through the anguish of contradictions and unsolved puzzles. Readers, like the keeper of The Log himself, learn that they must read the waters and sing the songs if there is to be any hope and joy. Book 2 of TheLog(2000) begins with a dedication to "brothers and sisters one and all / lost among us in precious memories" and a specific remembrance of Martin's University of Toledo professors Ernest Gray and Sarah S. Bissell and his longtime friend from the New York days, Irene Neuman (75). A passage from Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave sets the tone of exploration into the inner regions of slave life. While there may have been some humane masters and even some happy slaves, Northrup asks that we take heed of those who "discourse flippantly from arm chairs of the pleasures of slave life" (75). Let them join in the work of the fields and learn the secret thoughts that slaves dare not share, "and they will find that ninetynine out of every hundred are intelligent enough to understand their situation and to cherish in their bosoms the love of freedom, as passionately as ReclaimingHistory

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themselves" (76). In book 2, TheLog returns to spirituals and fugitive advertisements, the beating of the drums, and the shadows stretched out across the water. Slaves speak for themselves, longing still for those lost in travel, and we meet the aging Galileo who is on his last voyage-still trying to hear the messages in the water, searching for forgiveness, and still admitting to his own evil deeds. In the end it is the old woman rocking as she sings and composes the "Elder's Valedictory" that releases all into freedom. Sharecroppers ("Our hands are filled with / The futility of the unproductive earth," 77) sing hopeful spirituals ("0 wasn't it the man on his left side / who said remember me in paradise / and then he patiently died," 7g)-as Captain Galileo, near death, begins his final journey. "I know that when we retell a tale," he acknowledges, "we alter the truth accordingly" (82). Thus he begins his reiteration of the invitation that TheLog extends to readers to participate in the construction of the history they seek to know and preserve. In many ways the journey begins again, as Martin moved lines positioned earlier in the original Log to this key starting point for the revised denouement of discovery. "I will open my heart to you," Galileo is again prepared to say, but now even more he admits to his own equivocation and ambivalence-and his questions are pointed: "How do they translate the rub of water on their skin? / On the waters float the speech of the old land, / It lingers a while and then sinks quietly and heavily / No sound, only vibrations which water must translate" (84). The captain listens closely once again to "the old drums," the pain in the melody, the way "death is an achieved freedom." He is tormented by contradictions: "We navigate wild ships / carrying fortunes in / treasured onyx which / ceaselessly can reproduce / themselves over and over / making us rich / white men a thousandfold" (85). Galilee's soliloquies and hymns run counterpoint to the slave's songs as he obsesses over questions: "What immaculate travels do these waters hold? What histories can they dictate?" (86). In the end he seeks release ("I am looking for the land to repair me," 88) and comes to an understanding of the legacy of slavery itself ("How far will these shadows stretch before they fade?" 8g). In the end, he holds out hope for what he hears in the dark music of his ship: "So we find ourselves in treacherous exile longing to live again in a community of blood brothers and sisters where earth is friendly and welcomes each day's arrival" (go). The last twenty pages of TheLog move toward hope, forgiveness, and joy unimaginable at the beginning of the journey. The recollections of a slave set the tone: "I called on the promises of my ancestors / To lift me up, to place me on the back of an eagle / I marveled how I flew, how I danced on air. / The spirits of the old slaves taught me how; / The presence of their 140

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song comforted me / In my dark search for a new and happy place, / A place of smiles and joyous embrace" (92). At this point Martin creates a found poem about a slave who bought his freedom (95). He then hears in the voices of the wind a former slave who sent his boys to Wilberforce and his girls to Oberlin "to sing their way to freedom" (97). At last the captain makes his final confessions on his last voyage where he continues to perpetrate the economic scheme while holding out hope for understanding and even forgiveness. He has learned, he says, to look for "layers of self" and to expose his fears to the rough ridges of tactile waters: "If you listen carefully the sea will tell / All of its abnormal secrets" (99). On his last journey, the captain has "no interpreters." It was to be his "disciplined voyage" where he would capture slaves and carry them through whips of punishment across the waves. He has wronged human beings, he admits, as he offers the details of his log to somehow make sense or even make amends: "I leave you my jeweled memories; / Suffice it that they shall speak the truth / When I no longer can for they / Have seen what my heart felt" (100). With his cargo sailing in silence and in song, knitting "their wills together in the shape of a fishing net" (101), the captain reaches the end of his existence "trying to recognize / All the inexorable wrongs I have caused, to allow / My prayerful tongue to say what must be said aloud / I am but one of many unsatisfactory men" (102). After strutting and dancing his way across the seas and through atrocity untold, Galileo is haunted. He wants to "meet the bones of those I have left here / Year after year" (102), and he asks for a portion of whatever forgiveness might be possible. With that, the captain makes his exit, and the concluding words of The Log are spoken in the voice of the woman on the porch who does have access to forgiveness and joy and is willing to dispense them freely and decisively. At 01200 hours it is noted that Mary the old woman said, "My house is filled with precious memories"-and then her mind "wandered off into song" (104). What she sings is the extended metaphor of a house where the walls, floors, and windows have tasted, felt, and seen events that must be recalled: "Come sit by me and learn how to ease away the rough of life." She remembers that the riches of her blood were "sold off" like so much cattle while "no one said a mumbling word, not a word" (104). Instead, the money changers' placards announce "SALE, SALE, SALE, SALE / 400 hundred negroes required / Highest prices will be paid" (101). The old woman saves those memories under glass "stained with rain but still readable." She preserves as well "the joys of why I have remained" (108). She has nursed the sick and offered her house as shelter for those "sorely whipped and sealed with salt that ate away flesh." Her goal is to be a beacon for those who will ReclaimingHistory

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follow her, to irrigate places where the waters may flow: "A child comes after you that you do not know. / Make sure that the way you go becomes safe passage" (109). The last two entries in TheLog belong to the elders, who look back to the lessons taught by the waters and ahead to the creation of that safe passage for the children to come. An old woman sits "in the sun of the declining day" (109). Heir and descendant of the slave-ship inhabitants, she "listens to the echo of their watery voices" and tries to "taste the remembrance of their lives" (110). She has become "an old woman with revolutionary ideas" (111) who has learned that loneliness is worse than fear and who will not give up until the "old white men give us some room / To stretch out in" (113). Her goals are clear and her challenges to the reader are unmistakable: "The last voice I want to hear, / Is the whisper of wind telling me I am a refugee no longer / In a foreign land. / That I am recognized as something / Something beyond the texture of earth, / Something tasting the syntax of this foreign soil" (113-14). The last word in The Log is a found poem ("An Elder's Valedictory to the Known World") that returns to Africa and expresses the hope that there will arise"a cadre of superior beings / Selfless to region, to continent, to the world" (115). After all that has transpired, recorded in the logs, brought forward into the chronicles of the last three hundred years, and reconstructed by readers eager to reclaim a lost and distorted history, this valedictory expresses hope that "Africa's renaissance / Will strike deep roots in the earth's core / And circle this planet and blossom forever" (115). Through log entries and songs, posters, sermons, and jive chants, we receive a record of lost connections, despair, and strategies of survival. Through it all, the stories have been brutal, the text has turned ironically against itself, the narrator has been perplexed by his own questions and observations, and the contrapuntal mix of contrasts has invited readers to participate in the creation of the meaning that finally emerges. As readers reclaim history through the recovery and revision of crucial documents, the elder looks to a safe passage for those to come: "That none should be denied their freedom as we were / That none should be turned into refugees as we were / That none should be condemned to go hungry as we were / That none should be stripped of their dignity as we were" (115). This challenge to the audience shows how The Log makes readers themselves a part of the ensemble cast of characters traveling on the journey. The Log often speaks directly to its audience, inviting them to give voice to their own experiences that have been ignored or repressed. In his review of The Log, George Elliott Clarke places Martin in the landscape of what he calls "the simple and the sumptuous" traditions in African American poetry. The 142

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simple, Clarke notes, "sanctifies exhortation, rhetorical plainness, unadorned truth telling," whereas the sumptuous tradition "blesses ornate, elaborate eloquence, lucid loquaciousness" (Review 350). Hughes and Hayden are simple, whereas Dunbar and Dove are sensuous. Students of African American poetry will make their own judgments about poets who fit within and perhaps between these often overlapping categories. Clarke himself worries about pretenders whom he calls "preachers, politicos, 'rappers' of all sorts, all trying desperately to harness folk speech and'attitude' but ending up as bourgie minstrels or as 'wanna-be' roots intellectuals" (350). Martin's work over three decades as a poet and performer has shown how he shares Clarke's worries and how he has refused to plant himself exclusively within either of these traditions. Concern about preachers, rappers, and minstrels also suggests that the controversies Dunbar faced in his own time and that Martin has confronted in interpreting Dunbar are still far from settled. A closer look at examples of the simple and the sumptuous helps to underscore how Martin creates a counterpoint of the dominant features of each tradition. Clarke finds clarity and precision in TheLog: "Familiar with writing for music, [Martin] has an ear for rhythm and an eye for repetition, and these strengths serve him well, here, in lyrics addressing slavery, segregation' and survival, and which mimic the styles of the spirituals and the Blues" (Review 351). But although Clarke sees the struggle in TheLogto "get soul out on to paper" as "inspiringly titanic," he feels the success is only intermittent. He finds many lines of "pure hard-core imagism" in the journey as well as a freshening up of old songs as well as an excavation of historical texts to mine "the poetry hidden therein" (351). All this leads to a work "rife with lines of concentrated power," though-he feels-given to lapses of cliche such as a stone place where memory may take refuge and the assertion that gold and silver enslave royalty and ordinary folks alike. In counterpointing the simple and the sensuous, however, Martin's strongly oral poetry embraces the ordinary. While his speaker celebrates the poetry of David Walker's Appeal, the captain of the Vigilante does not worry or apologize for a proverb, and his plainspoken characters do not fail for being ordinary. Clarke identifies these counterpoint elements in Martin's work but somehow sees the synthesis of singularity and ordinariness as hesitancy. "Though undeniably talented," he concludes, "Martin exhibits a hesitant sense of what separates the singularly oral from the stodgily ordinary" (351). In The Logof the Vigilante, neither the narrator nor the historical characters who speak to us would make so sharp a separation between elements of orality and a quality of ordinariness that they would not see as stodgy. Martin's characters embrace what Clarke lovingly calls "the African American poetics of simplicity, of ReclaimingHistory

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soul-inspired utterance" (351). They embrace it whole, in all its contrapuntal complexity, the way Dunbar's characters sang with irony triumphing over embarrassment. TheLogofthe Vigilante epitomizes this kind of counterpoint artistry that Martin has created throughout his career. The slave-ship captain's confident moments in his diary are juxtaposed with his repressed doubts, his surmises about the feelings of his cargo, his outright admissions about the families he bought and separated, the escapees he hunted down, and the runaways he helped escape. The speaker of The Log is an amalgamation of contradictions constructed from the unsolvable mysteries of history itself. The volume exploits all the genres Martin has taken on: monologues of disenfranchised voices, dialogues reenacting debates, and a montage of posters and songs of every variety. Often the voices are contrapuntal mixes of slaves and overseers, slave-ship captains and hipsters, preachers at the funeral of James Americanus Crow overlayed with the preserved messages beating on the old African drums. Found poems, free papers, and blues songs merge in contrapuntal rhythms, which in less skillful hands might become mere pastiche. Martin's coffeehouse poetry machine reappears, the staged dialogues frame otherwise dry history-even Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound simplify the language-and the music of Dunbar hovers over everything. The major influences converge: Hayden's kaleidoscope, Lance Jeffers's dead-on pursuit of heritage, Langston Hughes's swing, and the surefired determination of that ubiquitous mother's voice. The Log is again a readerly and producerly text that pulls against itself, inviting readers to move through the anguish and healing to the joy. The contrapuntal mix of forms invites readers to puzzle along with the keeper of the log to reconstruct the unexplainable contradictions of race in American history. The evolution of the Log poems over two decades looks back to the militance of The Shit-Storm Poems (1973) and ahead to Martin's search for unpublished Dunbar manuscripts in the 1990S. It displays the controlled discontinuousness of the contrapuntals that nudge readers to face honest contradictions. His technique is "dialogical" in the same ways and for the same reasons found in Mikhail Bahktin's reading of Dostoevsky. The parallels are clear: dialectical oppositions are the only way to get even close to the complexity of Dostoevsky's world or the anguish of the legacy of slavery in America. Martin's text in The Log reads against itself because the history being reenacted is contradictory. His text is multivocal in every sense: speakers speak who are usually silent, heroes ask questions they ordinarily ignore, many of the questions raised have no answers, and the multiplicity of genres allows exploration from many angles at the same time. Martin 144

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spent twenty-five years writing The Log because he had to. It is unfinished in the way that a script to be performed is never finished and in the way that a history being reconstructed cannot ever be fully set in stone. TheLog stirs up wounds in order to heal them; it reenacts pain in order to understand the endurance, the survival, and the toughness of the joy. This very public game of historical reenactment is yet another version of the child of the Great Depression loading up the doggie bag, saving the memories in the vial, and stirring them all up again and again. It is also another intense exploration of death in order to grapple with life; it is a record of bloody plundering that comes to understand forgiveness, survival music, and somehow an often surprising and unexplainable persistence of love. It is a montage genre that empowers voices, communities, and individuals from Deadwood Dick to Willie Short, from West Africa 1686 to Dayton in 1986. Over the twenty-five years of its composition and through its evolution to the completed version published in 2000, The Log has been a signature poem in Martin's dedication to the reenactment and preservation of personal and collective histories. Throughout three decades he has been committed to historical research, and his poems have embodied the discourses he has shaped. "The Deadwood Dick Poems" (from The Shit-Storm Poems, 1973) investigated the accomplishments of black cowboys. "A Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary" (The Persistence of the Flesh, 1976) captured a crucial episode in the nation's conflicted time in Southeast Asia. "Ballad of a Fire" (TheForms ofSilence, 1980) reenacted events surrounding a fire in Pittsburgh. Martin explored personal history as well in the autobiographical sketches in "W. Poems: Pieces toward an Autobiography," in Final W and Southern Voices, and in the memory poems of Galileo's Suns (see chapters 6 and 10). Finally, in perhaps his most fully developed historical treatment of a contemporary character-"The Last Days of William Short"-Martin brought his reconstruction of history to bear on the acknowledgment and exploration of AIDS in American life and culture. In the mid-rcsos. William Short, a thirty-six-year-old Houston dishwasher, was shot in a robbery attempt on the restaurant where he worked. Martin read about Short-who contracted AIDS while hospitalized-in a Newsweek article (August 10,1987). A year later he read the plea of another victim of AIDS who found himself abandoned by family and friends. This second individual described his experiences in a letter to the Dayton Daily News. When he came to after surgery, his father (whom he had not seen in seventeen years) visited. "When he learned what I had, he immediately left, and I have not seen him since."? He confides that his friends abandoned him and he would never be a part of his family again: "I've experienced first ReclaimingHistory

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hand the hatred and prejudice that come with the disease. I've become a recluse, and have very little time left." His greatest fear was about what would happen when he dies: "I don't want to die and be forgotten. I just want to die with dignity." William Short had made that same desperate cry in the pages of Newsweek a year earlier: "Don't forget me. Mention my name now and then" (August 10,1987). Martin used the Newsweek and Dayton Daily News articles to create a composite of these two victims of AIDS. The stories of these two figures made a deep impression on the author of The Log and many other historical poems. "Memory and history seem to me inextricably bound up" in these stories, he would reflect ("World AIDS Day" lIB). The result was the monologue The Last Days of William Short-a tribute to a victim of yet another pestilence in the land. God's punishment through the flood" only worked for a little while," Willie's mother tells him, "and then the people went right on back to acting the fool again. Now he's got to come back and do the job and do the job right! Fire."3The destruction this time is revenge on a collapsing house, a fire bombing on the land. "Young and old are dying, falling like summer insects," his mother warns, "but don't nobody know who has done the spraying." The fire starts from the inside out as the body is destroyed. "Something keeps seeping in the blood and eating up everything that's good." William Short contracts AIDS quietly, innocently; he suffers senselessly and his deterioration is relentless. Through the metaphor of a house collapsing from within, Martin records the destruction: "The windows went ping like you said the eyes of that young black boy done when they lynched him years ago." William prays for stability though he knows his "efforts are straw." "History is beginning," he notes as he comes to understand the "rhythms" of his body's system losing strength. Caught in a struggle between flesh and soul, he rejects "the sweet taste of desire" in favor of love, "the sacred adventure of life." Through the daily record of his dying, the lessons are almost Buddhist: "The simplest way to avoid adversity / was to pastor human greeds, to shepherd my brain." He finds death is a "popular place" and he requests that the living sing for him then one of those "frightful hymns which elders used to sing." And so, he concludes, a rat will eat away at our foundations and "nothing like salt can preserve memory." Finally as all the flesh melts and desires turn to water, the only enduring life will be history and memory as enacted in living community. Nearly a decade after he began The Last Days of William Short, Martin marked World AIDS Day by addressing several issues: "When a single individual in society dies," he notes, "I am affected by an inexplicable loss" ("World AIDS Day" lIB). Martin is bereft over the loss of so many artists 146

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and concludes that "the arts are under an even harsher scrutiny from the mean spirited and the faint of heart, never mind the damage suffered from benign neglect" (lIB). The black dishwasher who spoke from his Newsweek photograph had pronounced a sentence that Martin felt none of us can escape or ignore. In that one issue of the magazine alone he counted fortyseven "musicians, composers, opera and cabaret singers, dancers, playwrights, architects, artists, actors, and actresses (for those willing to make the distinction), TV and theatre directors, clothing, lighting, stage, and graphic designers, editors, journalists, and photographers who were victims of this dread disease. The list is too long." Bemoaning all the creative energies lost and the many people also "who were never even recognized for their potential," he looks at the AIDS quilt to see "if I recognize a familiar name, a famous name" who would have made our lives better, but for the loss brought about through our indifference and complacency. He calls for an art that will anger us, "tweak our sensibilities, make us meditate, alter, transform" (journal entries in HWMP). Art is supposed to challenge and provoke, he insists, "it was never meant to leave us where it found us." He remains appalled, given our nation's resources, about how little has been accomplished to deal with the disease. Many are content to point the finger at "their" disease or to assign blame. Instead, he proposes that we make a list, compose a litany that "may once again link each and everyone of us to that which we call a better nature" (lIB). He closes his editorial with a poem, "At Risk," which begins the creation of that list. Each of the first forty lines in the poem begins "I could make a litany ... ," and the list moves from remembrances of poets and singers to lawyers and engineers, teachers and athletes, those in the armed services, priests, contractors, and politicians. The people are black and white, red and yellow, young and old, the carousers, and the inhibited. The names include the unannounced and announced, the grizzly and the grays. "I could make a list of all the death for sale." As the poet moves toward his conclusion, he once again makes all this more than a list as he brings home the realization of how we are implicated not only in the disease but in our own indifference: "I could make a list of the silence that touches all / Of us like a dark utterance, a shroud of pain / Which we find ourselves wrapped in." His poem remembers the man who worried his name would be forgotten and speaks to us all in ways that break the silence and attack the indifference. The Last Days of William Short is a book-length narrative poem that combines short prose passages and poems speaking at first in the voice of Willie's mother and then almost entirely in Willie's own voice. There are fifty-three sections of varying lengths. The mood is somber and often brutal, as might /'

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be expected when indifference and neglect are attacked head-on. The tone has a great deal of the transforming anger that Martin suggests is central to art. In his response to the manuscript, poet Karl Shapiro admits that he was at first "put off by" the opening monologues, "but as the prose evolved into poetry, I sensed the smoothness (you might say the inevitability) of the transition." Shapiro sees the book as a "shocker." The subject is "about as stark as we can imagine these days." In his letter to Martin, Shapiro notes: "You handle this seemingly impossible material with great feeling and art. It is done with love and dignity, without mitigating the horror. You are to be commended" (September 2, 1992, HWMP). While many of the poems in the collection have been published in journals such as the VincentBrothers' Review, the JamesWhiteReview, and BlackAmericanLiteratureForum, the completed poem is not yet in print. The manuscript reads like a film with fifty-three scenes, some very short and striking and others more expansive in voice and plot. Sections move like a slide show, at times even like a collage. Considerable juxtaposition introduces the signature counterpoint of vitality and impending death, the clashes of the seasons, the glimmers of hope dashed against inevitability and then redeemed by love. Terror and courage, love and despair, the house and the body, hope and hopelessness are counterpointed in the narratives and monologues. Willie's mother sets a tone in the opening section: "Child ... we knew what was true before the scientists knew what was true; you need to listen a bit more carefully to the natural sounds around you and then act." Everyone is in such a hurry now, she says, "the Lord doesn't take away the light and leave us all in the intolerant dark, because we done been here long enough." The pestilence is coming, she is sure, and she adds: "When you gets to be my age, well ... when you come to your dying age, you ought to have some serious heaven in mind. You ought to be familiar with bright eternity." Ironically, Willie will be one of those young taken by the pestilence. In poem number 10, William Short makes an "agreement with these curtained windows and these walls," and he begins his dying. "When I am dead cover my pains to divert the curious eyes," he requests. Now that he is dying he feels "the strong pulse of song," and he recalls that each room has its own emotion, memories, sustenance. He asks for stability and confides, "I fall free of this flesh." As in the functioning of any house, the body's need will prevail: "The brain and heart must simply comply. / I know this as I begin to die." The destruction wrought by this disease, he admits, takes effect on both the infected and those who merely stand by: "This is a quiet and human disease / That awaits slowly the dying / While debilitating the living." His- . tory begins as "the rhythms" of the body's system "grow slower and slower." 148

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William and his mother do talk some again. "Love is the sacred adventure / Of life Mother," he tells her: "I know son, I know" is all she can add. Thinking ahead to all the preparations for burial, the washing and the lining of the coffin and all the work there is to do, he concludes, "Death is a popular place" where the body will suffer "from terminal sleep." He asks for hymns at his funeral and hopes people will say his name for a long time after that. William tells his mother of his still voracious appetite: Seven full courses / ending with a "cordial, desert, and death." The final movements cry out for redemption, make confession, and flourish in the sunrise of Easter morn: "The spirit can not be / Contained by space or time. / I speak of visionary kingdom. / They are not difficult to see. / Faith is an invisible expectation." Though he is suffocating, William Short's spirit thrives: "So my dying is a prison no longer. / I have no fear of it; / I have seen a bright and capable light; / It has dismantled all my personal fears." Willie's courageous spirit speaks forth in his final requests: "Let tulips surround the acreage of my body. / Let loveliness emerge from the delirious stamen / Let the silent invasion of casual pollen / Be the final testament of renewal." In the end, TheLast Daysof WilliamShort holds out hope for renewal from the pestilence-but it must be a renewal born of honest meditation and transformation. Like TheLogof the Vigilante, TheLast Days of William Short gives voice to the oppressed and the overlooked. Both works reenact the experiences of victims and their resolve to be remembered for more than the pain they endured. Although the final version of TheLogwas not complete until 1998, the narrative had evolved over more than two decades. Martin's developing narrative techniques in these works continue to display counterpoint patterns going as far back as his coffeehouse days in New York. Now the voice was steadier, the exploration of history more extensive, the unveiling of hypocrisy and paradox more extensive. At the same time, the musical motifs of The Log anticipated Martin's efforts as an opera librettist and his growing commitment to Dunbar that was about to take him in even more new directions. With the reluctant partnership now firmly in place, Martin would soon become not only the Dayton laureate's principal interpreter on the stage but a Dunbar scholar as well.

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·8·

PaulLaurence Dunbar and Herbert Woodward Martin in Their Own Voices Martin the Dunbar Scholar

In the summer of 1993 Martin's lifelong partnership with Paul Laurence Dunbar would take an unexpected and radically different turn. He had been teaching and performing Dunbar's poetry for two decades, and in his "Research and Bibliography" class at the University of Dayton, he often asked students to go on scholarly hunts for little-known facts about Dunbar. In preparing for a seminar in 1993, he made some discoveries of his own. For several years he had been incorporating into his one-man show material from Dunbar's letters, and he was increasingly aware as well of works beyond the poems and novels in the known canon. He was very interested, for example, in the one-act opera Dunbar had written with the English composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor (Dream Lovers) while he was in London in 1898. There were also two musicals, In Dahomey and Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), and an unpublished one-act play with music, Uncle Epb'sChristmas-all three written with Will Marion Cook. On his own scholarly scavenger hunts, Martin began to pick up hints about previously unknown short stories and plays, and the clues led him from Dayton to the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus and to the Library of Congress. At first he found one new play in manuscript-Herrick-and that discovery led him over the next few years to several uncollected and unpublished essays, stories, musical lyrics, plays, poems, and fragments that would be published for the first time in In HisOwn Voice: TheDramaticand OtherUncollected Works ofPaulLaurence Dunbar,' The publication of In His Own Voice is the culmination of a new dimension of the Dunbar-Martin partnership. Extending back to his boyhood days in Alabama in the 1930S, Martin had been at first a • 15°·

reluctant and then an enthusiastic interpreter of Dunbar's poetry. Adding to his achievements first as a teacher and a performer of Dunbar, Martin found several totally unknown works that set him on the course of putting into circulation in the available canon more than seventy-five previously uncollected poems, short stories, essays, and plays. Among the vast array of Dunbar works never before collected, those most relevant to Martin's own development as a poet and performer are the littleknown plays and musicals. In many ways, Herrick is a product of Dunbar's resistance to becoming trapped in dialect. Written while he was living in England, the play presents all white characters and features as its protagonist the English poet Robert Herrick, who-in many ways-is a stand-in for both Dunbar himself and for Martin and other African American poets who identify with the dilemmas he faces in the play. Dunbar's short dramatic pieces are central to Martin's artistry for another important reason as well. In musicals such as Uncle Eph's Christmas and jes Lak White Fo'ks, Dunbar confronted the stereotypes of the minstrel tradition prevalent in his own time. Through the creation of outrageous characters and subtle ironic humor, Dunbar created a parodic undermining of the conventions in which many have assumed he was trapped. Martin's attention to such ironic nuances-first in his Dunbar one-man show and then in his textual scholarship-allowed him to bring alive the full range of Dunbar's language as well as his political satire and social commentary. Like Dunbar, Martin identified with Bob Herrick and Pompous [ohnsing, who both emerge from the complex tradition of the African American trickster. Martin's emphasis on the irony within these plays continued to inform his performances of Dunbar and helped him correct many misconceptions about Dunbar's place in the "plantation" and "minstrel" schools of literature. At the same time, Martin's research on Dunbar helped shape the authentic voices in his own new poems and provided models for his own increasing experimentation with operatic librettos. In many ways Martin had been a Dunbar scholar for at least twenty years. His Dunbar Centennial Celebration in Dayton in 1972 brought together poets and scholars for a discussion that ultimately sparked a Dunbar revival. His performances of Dunbar had restored the poems to their authentic voice and context, and his one-man show evolved into a significant interpretive statement about Dunbar's life and works. In addition to interpretations through performance, his contributions to Dunbar scholarship followed more conventional research routes as well. In 1979 his monograph, PaulLaurence Dunbar:A Singer of Songs, appeared in the Ohio Authors Series published by the State Library of Ohio. In 1984 he was a major contributor to the Twentig Dunbar and Martin in TheirOwn Voices

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Productions video Paul Laurence Dunbar, a project that presented a deeper exploration of Dunbar's work for school audiences. He soon after completed the research for the entry for June 27, Dunbar's birth date, for Bookof Days, 1987, AnEncyclopedia ofInformation Sources onHistorical Figures andEvents, Keyed to Calendar Dates. His work for this calendar assembled accessible scholarly data on the poet's life and works and provided references-including multimedia sources-ranging from children's works about the subject to a review of the most up-to-date scholarly contributions. Five years later a full-length video of his show directed by Thomas Skill was published together with onlocation shots at the Dunbar House and the poet's gravesite. Martin starred in PaulLaurence Dunbar: TheEyes ofthe Poet (1992), a video that featured performance but included considerable interviews with Dunbar scholars as well. In the mid-to-late 1990S Martin contributed to several Web sites devoted to Dunbar, and he continued his own bibliographical hunts as well. As early as 1972, when Margaret Walker taught him to "sight-read" Dunbar, Martin began his scholarly reexamination of his predecessor's life and works. Stereotypes about dialect, which were a problem for readers of Dunbar's poems in the early 1970S, have persisted well into our own time. Martin quotes Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s observation that we "tend to read Dunbar backwards" by comparing him to Sterling Brown or Langston Hughes, and we therefore miss "how startling was Dunbar's use of black dialect as the basis of poetic diction." Or, Gates notes, we mix up Dunbar's achievements with "the unfortunate poetic efforts" of his "less talented imitators," and again we miss the boldness of his efforts to create authentic voice (Signifying Monkey 176). Through all these controversies about the purposes and effects of dialect, Martin brought the poems to life on the stage-often several nights a week in cities across the country. While there has been progress in understanding dialect, Black English, Ebonies, and any authentic speech captured in poetry, confusions persist. Each night in question-and-answer sessions following his performances, Martin to this day continues to address the delicate nuances of how to preserve and interpret the dialect while appreciating his standard English works as well. As a performer and teacher as well as a student of Dunbar, Martin grappled with that intricate interrelationship between dialect and standard English. In his monograph on Dunbar, he documented considerable evidence from essays and letters about the challenges Dunbar faced and the strategies he used to deal with the obstacles of racism. In 1993, in an essay presented to the Ohio Humanities Council, he addressed Dunbar's dual sense of communities: the dichotomies he expressed between the oftenhospitable daily events of slavery and his strong protests of injustice. Mar152

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tin comes down on the side of Dunbar's "split vision" and how he attempted to show his readers "varied sides of community" ("Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Vision of Community," HWMP). His awareness of these conflicts only deepened as he continued to teach and perform Dunbar's work in the 1980s and 1990S. He knew as well of the existence of lost manuscriptsstories, plays, and musicals that were alluded to in the letters or essays. As a result, when he found the manuscript of Herrick, earlier conflicts and efforts intensified, and the literary scavenger hunt gained in both intensity and direction. "So now I am building a case for his dramatic arts," Martin wrote about his new role as a Dunbar scholar. The newly discovered dramas in standard English build the argument "that it was the only way he could escape the pigeon-hole of dialect" (letter to the author, April 2, 1995, HWMP). In the same letter Martin notes that he found two one-acts that were copyrighted, but the number of errors in the texts suggest that they were probably never published. The Library of Congress also told him there were two other full-length plays that "were tossed on the trash heap before they started to microform pieces." These literary discoveries and the almost certain prospect of more to be found sent him on a further search that would significantly expand the known Dunbar canon. Martin had always included standard English as well as dialect poems in his Dunbar show. The range of his own acting abilities and vocal powers allowed him to move effortlessly from "An Ante-Bellum Sermon" to "The Poet and His Song," from "The Party" to "When Malindy Sings" to "The Unsung Heroes." His performances showcased the naturalness of conventional standard-English forms and the authentic dialect of everyday speech. As he selected passages that illustrated Dunbar's experimentation with language, he became further intrigued by the plays and musicals Dunbar wrote while living in Dayton, New York, and London. In his research at the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus, Martin scoured the Dunbar papers for two one-acts and a full-length play Dunbar was known to have composed most likely while he was living in London about 1898. Locating only a fragment of the dramatic texts in Columbus, he took his quest to the Library of Congress, where an alert reference librarian directed him to the Carter G. Woodson historical papers. It seems Dunbar had given a copy of Herrick to the actor Richard Harrison, who in turn gave it after Dunbar's death to his widow, Alice Dunbar-Nelson. She later passed on the play to Carter Woodson-the copy Martin found among Woodson's papers. "It was probably written for white actors, which is one of the reasons why it's such an interesting find," he notes: "It's also the first look at a purely dramatic work by Dunbar" (Morris, "UD Professor" sA). Dunbar and Martin in TheirOwn Voices

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Herrick, an Imaginative Comedy in Three Acts is written in the form and style of an eighteenth-century English comedy of manners. Based loosely on the life of poet Robert Herrick, Dunbar's plot follows the efforts of Bob Herrick to woo the lady Cynthia. Complications arise with the appearance of several other suitors and the objections to Herrick advanced by Cynthia's father, Sir Peter Temple. Father and suitors conspire against Herrick, who succeeds nonetheless due to his charm, wit, and gift of gab. Herrick talks his way out of several traps and into the heart of Cynthia with lines like these: "A heart as soft, a heart as kind / A heart as sound and free / As in the whole world thou canst find / That heart I'll give to Thee" (In His Own Voice 27). 2 And again: "Thou art my life, my love, my heart / The very eyes of me / And has command of every part / To live and die for thee" (28). Here is Herrick in soliloquy: "How smilingly the sun looks on the earth, / Me thinks, he's glad that Cynthia lives; / Glad with the gladness that I feel" (41). And again: "I do unbare my brow and know the joy / That she doth breathe this same perfumed air / Which laves my brow with its caressing touch. / Ah, Cynthia, 'tis thy breath perfumes the air / Me thought it was a rose. Ah, no 'tis not, / No rose as sweet as thou ere sucked its life / And took its glory from the common earth" (41-42). The language and imagery here are a long way from Dunbar's plantation scenes or angry protest poems. In pursuing his goals, Dunbar no doubt wrote Herrick and other such plays at least in part to show he could master the language and the nuance and to round out his achievements as a composer of richly complex and diverse dialogue. Martin speculates that he had other goals in mind as well. "I'm hesitant at this point about drawing connections between Dunbar's life and this play, but there may well be some," Martin suggests: "If he wrote the play while he was in England, Dunbar was within months of marrying Alice Moore. Her family was among the social elite in New Orleans and may have looked down on the self-made Dunbar, who worked for a time as an elevator operator in a Dayton office building" (Morris, "UD Professor" SA). The real Robert Herrick was not to the manor born either, Martin notes, and achievement through hard work was a personal theme for Dunbar. No doubt Dunbar wrote Herrick to make an attempt at the conventions of this very English genre, but he took considerable pleasure as well in the exploits of his underdog hero. Then, too, Martin reminds us Dunbar was always "at some pains" to show his range: "Black writers have long been under a dictum that they can only write about black subjects and black people" ("Unpublished Dunbar Play Discovered" 8E). Martin's assessment of the place of Herrick in Dunbar's career provides insight as well on his own aspirations as a poet and performer. There are no 154

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black characters in the play, and Dunbar uses no dialect of any kind. Instead, he reproduces authentic speech patterns of English drama, and he has some fun mastering and modifying several conventions of plot, character, and theme in the genre. Martin sees Herrick as one of Dunbar's most ambitious attempts to be judged on his own merits with no efforts to fit any preconceived critical judgments-no matter how well intended. With all the stereotypical patterns and predictable literary goals set aside, Martin concludes that Dunbar's ear is accurate, his characters well developed and interesting, his insights into human nature unwavering. Beyond the correctives Herrick brings to our understanding of Dunbar's mastery of standard English and conventional dramatic forms, Martin emphasizes as well parallels in the lives of two poets-Dunbar and Herrick-whose aspirations were beaten down in similar ways by the forces of class and race prejudice. The similarities between Dunbar and Herrick as aspiring poets confronting obstacles advanced Martin's understanding of the anguish experienced by his predecessor in Dayton. Martin's stage portrayal of Dunbar's poetry is itself informed by Bob Herrick's heroism. Consider, for example, Sir Peter's plots to keep Herrick away from his daughter: "I tell you my good fellows, he's a damned presumptuous dog. Are the times so poor, so damnably poor that every barking upstart of a poetaster may aspire to the hand of the leading lady in the country?" (17). Sir Peter throughout plans to trap Herrick, to make him look foolish, and to load the odds against any achievements to which he might aspire. Dunbar's character who supports Herrick, aptly named Will Playfair, speaks on his behalf: "I scarce have a right to speak in this our cause. First off, Bob Herrick is my friend, I, a rival to aspire for your daughter's hand with these two gentlemen, and therefore, must some enmity feel against him who is the peer himself of any here who speaks him ill" (17-18). The pointedness of Sir Peter's attack contains no doubt much of the same aversion Dunbar felt directed toward his efforts: You gentlemen, have I asked to meet her here, and with you asked that rhyming, dangling boy, Bob Herrick. A woman's mind is a light thing and Cynthia in her younger days did lean toward him, and in your hands tonight I leave the chance to break this family's chain, to make a boor of him; before she comes to make him drunk, and when she's here to make him so behave before her face that she will soon hear the devil and his hellish chants as Bob Herrick and his ladies' songs. (18) While Mr. Harlowe Wetheridge, Sir Harry Hastings, and Sir Godfrey Gailspring move forward to assist in Sir Peter's plot, Cynthia has been hiding in Dunbar and Martin in TheirOwn Voices

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the house and warns Herrick of the impending mischief ("I will warn him so to arm that he will turn aside the shafts of all their foul intentions"). Together they foil the plot planned to ruin Herrick, and Dunbar lets his hero win the day: I know not if it be you yourself, Sir Peter, who has set these cowards on to taunt me and in this unmanly manner to put me to the test, but this I know: Robert Herrick doth defy you all and tells you right now here in your own house that poets know not only how to twang the lute and make song, but how to wield a soldier's arm as well. And if these gentlemen singly come to put affront upon me, name your own weapons, and you shall find me deft as well with steel as with quill. (33) Later Herrick foils a second plot against him and saves Cynthia, her father, and the other woman. In these and other scenes in the play, Herrick's victories over his mockers become the vindication Martin has always wanted for Dunbar. Of course the elevator operator from Dayton never did feel this kind of victory in his own time, but it has been an abiding motivation of Martin's career to provide that vindication and satisfaction later through a reconstruction of as complete as possible a version of his predecessor's accomplishments as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Herrick is a successful play in which Dunbar shows proficiency with the conventions of the genre. Critic Calvin Hernton has predicted that someone will produce the play soon: "It could turn out to be a hit" (Morris SA). Dunbar no doubt created Bob Herrick's challenges to match some of his own-and his hero's magnanimous triumphs project his hopes for his own art. Martin not only found the lost manuscript of this play but he identified with the vindication of Dunbar's much-maligned hero. "Herrick wins both day and night," Martin revels: "He has demonstrated courage in the face of artistocratic foolishness." Consider further the Dunbar-Martin-Herrick affinities in more lines given to the hero. Accused of being drunk, Herrick first pretends to sleep when a servant enters and then speaks this soliloquy when the stage is his: This is the province of the poet, to wake when others sleep, to sleep perchance, when others wake, who knows? To be the jest of others and himself to jest. To love and be despised of his lessers. Ah, me, the world has fallen on evil days, when no one doth respect the poet's song and give him ear. 'Tis strange, 'tis passing strange, with good Will Shakespeare yet so shortly dead, and rare Ben Jonson singing still. Will had his Lucy and his 156

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stolen deer, and I my Temple and my stolen love. Ha, ha, we go a merry gait who ride that fleet steed Pegasus, and feed on Fancy's bread. (29) Not only do Herrick-Dunbar-Martin get the last laugh, but working back through Martin-the-scholar finding Dunbar-the-playwright's play about Herrick-the-poet, they all get to enjoy the lyrics which Bob Herrick composes about Cynthia: And now a kiss to sun and day and air, For they are glad with me that she is there; Yes, 'Tis the very essence of alloy That mortals leap too soon unto their joy; So, I will bide me here a little while, Enjoy the morning and the morning's smile And while I walk thy golden paths along Weave to thee, Cynthia, my wooing song. (42) It is perhaps more than coincidence that Martin has brought back into circulation a play in which Dunbar confronted the indifference and even impertinence that greeted much of his work. Through his mastery of the language and conventions of British drama, Dunbar was attempting to escape the typecasting that praise of his dialect poems had unfortunately created. Martin's scholarly finds advanced the efforts of his one-man show: to demonstrate the range and complexity of Dunbar's achievements. Through Herrick's bold and witty speeches Dunbar underscores his own ideas about the nature and impact of poetry: views often overlooked in poems like "The Poet," "Sympathy," "The Mask," and "Equipment" get a new hearing in Bob Herrick's triumphs. With the discovery of Herrick, Martin was nudged somewhat unwillingly into the role of Dunbar scholar. He has accepted that challenge, found several additional lost manuscripts, and incorporated many uncollected and generally unknown works into his one-man show. Above all, he continues to be a performer of Dunbar as well as a writer of his own poetry and opera librettos. In the continuing evolution of his work as a writer and performer, scholarly research on Dunbar has opened up some new questions and reaffirmed many of the critical judgments he had been expressing over the decades in his performances. Among the Herbert W. Martin Papers at the University of Toledo is a fragment that contributes to our understanding of how Martin as a scholarly performer-teacher approaches the life and works of Dunbar. At the Dunbar and Martin in TheirOwn Voices

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conclusion of his program notes ("Making a Libretto") for the opening of the opera PaulLaurence Dunbar:Common Ground (May 12,1995), Martin assumes Dunbar's persona and comes back from the dead to praise with "ecstasy" the achievements of composer Adolphus Hailstork's "Soulful Song." In that same spirit in this prose fragment, Dunbar begins by defending himself against the charges that he had sometimes been too accommodationist. "I am neither upset nor angry," the isolated ghostlike presence observes: "I simply wonder who among us has not had to submit to compromise at one time or another" (HWMP). As Dunbar's canon expands and we learn more about the complexity of his failures as well as his successes, Martin is determined in scholarship and performance to set the record straight. "Even as I speak to you now I have had to pay a certain young poet for the use of his body and voice," he adds tongue-in-cheek, "And since I am dead, there is no reason to feel jealousy. So I shall give him time after the defense of my position to read to you these poems." Framing the goals of his scholarship in this imaginary monologue, Martin suggests yet another dimension to his at first reluctant but now long and most productive partnership. "Every generation finds the time trying," the "Dunbar" of this fragment continues, "My lifetime was no exception, but I wrote as best I could under and despite the circumstances. I do not ask for praise or acceptance, only for the next few moments that you listen to my words of protest, love, pain, humor and joy. I hope they will renew your confidence and speak.... " And the fragment breaks off. Perhaps Martin thought Dunbar had said enough, and it was up to us to finally listen. In performances, in the composition of his own works, and now as a Dunbar scholar, Martin continues to present his defense of Dunbar's position. With the publication of so many lost and uncollected manuscripts, there is now much more evidence for the defense. In the lost manuscripts Martin found more support for the idea that Dunbar straddled two traditions-the romantic and the minstrel-and that his ways of attempting to reconcile those emphases led to considerable critical controversy. Again Henry Louis Gates Jr. reminds us that by 1865 dialect in literary works had come to suggest inferiority in African Americans. The language continued to cast a shadow over both slavery and the dubiousness of "improvability" and "progress," key concepts at the turn of the century (SignifyingMonkey 176). Recalling William Dean Howells's famous praise of Dunbar's dialect poems, Martin finds in these lost or previously uncollected works instances of how Dunbar was a clever maneuverer, walking that fine line between conformity to the status quo and ironic social protest. In the musical Clorindy, for example, Dunbar wrote dialect even to the point of stereotypes in order 158

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to gain an acceptance that would never otherwise be afforded to him. First he needed the forum and the audience, and then he created a consistent ironic tone in which characters play the fool or mock themselves. In his stage performances of Dunbar's works, Martin takes on the issue of "coon words" and other matters of minstrel style easily misconstrued. Pointing to the use of derogatory racial terms by current African American youths in certain settings considered acceptable, Martin asks, "Can we blame Dunbar if we do not equally blame ourselves?" He no doubt has in mind current rap music or perhaps the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, including the work of Gil Scott Herron and the Last Poets as well as the "rappin and reading" of Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) and politically charged words by Sonia Sanchez and others. In his Dunbar show Martin suggests that "A Negro Love Song" ("Jump back, honey, jump back") might be considered one of the first rap poems. Contributing to the layers of irony in Dunbar's "minstrel" works, Martin finds that the white characters often try to "pass for coons"-a phenomenon studied at length in later works by Eldridge Cleaver, in Norman Mailer's "The White Negro," and in the desire by "Beat" writers and other counterculture protest figures to find their place in the African American tradition in blues, jazz, and soul. Then, too, Dunbar's dialogue often points to subtleties of lyrics that are lost or the limited understanding of white audiences and again Dunbar's incorporation of tropes of black minstrelsy to satirize or undermine the traditions he is alleged to espouse. Martin also raised the issue of what it means for authors to be popular in their own times. Dunbar chooses to include tropes of the minstrel show tradition-some even offensive-in part because he is then able to attract an audience who will see and hear his modification, mockery, and other critiques of that stereotyping. His use of such ironic undertones became enabling conditions for advancing his satire in several directions, both as a mock of the stereotypical roles and a probing insight into the behavior and motivation of white folks. Consider the chorus of the song "Emancipation Day" from the musical Clorindy: "On Emancipation Day / All you white folks clear de way / ... Coons dressed up lak masqueraders / Porters armed lak rude invaders / When dey hear dem ragtime tunes / White folks try to pass fo' coons on Emancipation Day." This is not only the irony of role playing and whites wanting to release themselves through black culture, it also reflects what Martin underscores in the fiction of Charles Chestnutt, who "incorporated dangerous tropes of black minstrelsy into their own signifying satire." As John Fiske has shown us (see chapter 5, earlier), that is, how popular culture works in a democratic society: the public expresses its own values through what it makes popular-all the while both espousing and Dunbar and Martin in TheirOwn Voices

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undermining the dominant values of the culture on the whole. Martin's position echoes Gary D. Engle's analysis of the problems encountered by Dunbar and his collaborator Will Marion Cook: "For better or worse, the characteristic art of a democracy is shaped by the will of the audience, not by the artist. Popularity becomes one measure of artistic value" (xiii). Perhaps the "for better" part of this proposition for Dunbar and Cook and for Martin is that the artist is able to use the popularity to undermine and critique the values seeming to be espoused. If what Engle calls "the banjo-plunking, blackface minstrel clown" was a staple of the stage at the time and if Dunbar and Cook wanted a forum at all, they were forced to use at least some of the conventions then dominant. The key issue is not that they used those conventions but how they moved them in new directions that would give their own art an authenticity as well as some distance from the actions and attitudes they were mocking. In his interpretations of [es Lak White Fo'ks and Uncle Epb's Christmas, Martin comes down hard on how Dunbar makes space for his own artistry within the often-suffocating confines of the genres he was expected to follow. In Uncle Epb's Christmas, for example, an abundance of minstrel-style dialect and malapropisms might be construed by some as Amos 'n' Andy degradation. Martin reminds us, however, that these deliberate distortions of language in the script show that Dunbar was fully aware of the mechanics and the tradition upon which these dramas were built. Uncle Eph'sChristmas emphasizes pure entertainment-even fluff-rather than plot, and it is loaded with malapropisms and other elements of slapstick common in the kind of drama he was writing. Further, ironies are tucked into corners everywhere and even burst forth on occasion as in Darky Dan's song: You white folks don't 'lect no man Less he's of yo' nation. What you want to do's to keep Black folks in dey statien. But dese black folks boun' to have Some one go a starrin', So in Dixie Land, I spend All my time a Czarrin', (In His Own Voice 122) This is hardly the usual fare of the minstrel tradition-and neither, Martin notes, is Dunbar's consistent emphasis on the value of an education. Beyond the conventional trappings of character-albeit often offensive-and the lay-

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ers of irony Dunbar creates, these dramatic entertainments emphasize most what Martin describes as Dunbar's play of language and his gift for satire. [esLak White Fo'ks is a comedy of manners using the theme of social aspirations as a satire on the values of white society. The major concerns of the play can be summed up in an early speech given by Mr. Pompous Johnsing. After digging up a treasure chest of gold, Pompous decides that you can't "advertise dah gold all ovah town" because the white folks grab it up for themselves. "Some folks ain't got no mo'sense n'ter walk up to trouble an ask fu' an introduction.... we won't tell white folks, jes' de colo'ed folks" (136). After a chorus of "Spread de news, spread de news / Mistah Johnsing's found de gold / Found de gold dat once was hid," Pompous pushes everyone away and states "impressively" what Martin takes to be Dunbar's major concerns in the play: "I want yo all to und'stand I got a plan in regard to dis gold. I got social aspirations. You know when white men gets rich dem don stay hyeah wha ezybody knows 'em en knows dey ain' much. Dey go to Europe, and by m by you readin' de papers en you say: 'Huh! Heah Mr. Wilham Vanderbilt Sunflower's daughter married a duke" (136). But Pompous Johnsing declares that he does not want any "bargain counter duke" for his daughter. While she does not have "a diploma from Vassar," he has been engaged in diplomatic relations with an African King for her to marry a prince. "I ani' ready yit. I goin' get Mandy a family tree. Dey er so cheap in Europe dey use 'em fer kindlin wood. Mandy she'll have a family tree. [es' lak white fo'ks" (136). Of course Pompous's declarations are sendups, and the rest of this short play piles on the kind of satire reflected in the song "The Colored Girl from Vassar." Have you heard the latest that is "startling all the nation?" asks Mandy about the "school that was so rare / that a poor dusky maid couldn't breathe its very air." The chorus assures all that you can't go there unless you are a millionaire. Mandy becomes that "first dark belle who ever went to Vassar," and the chorus fills in "and played her part so well she came from Madagascar" (138). She did not tell them about her "dark papa," and when she was admitted "the papers howled and said it was a shame." While they agreed that she definitely "was to blame" and that "she had played an awful little game," yet "they had to own that she got there just the same" (139). The parody continues in the song "Evah niggah is a king" sung by Pompous with every assurance that while the white folks "ain' got all de title" they need, "When a darky starts to huntin' / He is sho to prove a king." The chorus reiterates: "Evah Niggah is a king / Royalty is jes' de ting / Efyo social life's a bungle / [es you go back to yo' jungle / An remember dat yo

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Martin performs his Paul Laurence Dunbar (Detroit, October 3, 1997) in a one-ma n show with origin s in early 1 9 70 S Dayton. Courtesy of Central Michigan University.

daddy was a kin g" (141). Just in case Dunbar's audience misses th e satire and inserts hi s play back into the plantation-school pigeonhole, he turns Pompous loose one more time with rh yme and style and panache: To get in high society I've always had an ambition And since I've got the dough now We are sure to have position A royal prince my little girl shall wed For since the day of Lords and dukes has sped 16 2

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It takes a prince to place you at the head Of th e best soc iety. (142 -43) Now Mandy knows her father an d tells him that he's got to be kidding. Of course the tone, the rhymes, an d th e m usic suggest that her concl usions are dead on : "Fat her you're only mocking / Such levit y is only shocking" (143) . At this poin t Ma ndy and th e chor us bu r st into numerous cho r uses of song abo ut not caring for fools becau se "love di gnifies the soul it r ules" (144 ). New money, old money, aristocrats, and moving to Europe-none of it matters because "The hum ble cot becomes a throne / W hose dw eller y place love makes her ow n." The called-for prince arrives only to be rejecte d by both Mandy and Pom pou s, who, th e stage di recti on s tell us, "decides after all that an hon est American Negro is a man who w ill look after hi s daughter an d make a living for her best" (144) . In the en d, th e satire co mes full circle an d Pompous's resolve w ins out: "And anyhow he is happier as an ordinary dark ey, therefore he decides to quit acting ju st lik e w hite folks" (144). It is easy to see why Dunba r was so fru strated whe n peopl e mi ssed hi s irony, so dismaye d whe n readers co nfuse d his subtle lyri cs w ith pl ant ati on stereotypes, so trap ped when critics dem anded a narrow range of wo rk fro m a writer who ma st er ed so many for ms and techniques. In hi s one-ma n show of Dunbar's works, Martin hopes to correc t som e of these mi sconceptions. Ma rtin's di scoveries of lost Dunbar m anuscripts have added mu ch to hi s performance and teaching of th e Dunbar canon . Soon after finding Herrick he began to in corporate m or e excer pts from letters and essays into hi s show, and the pla ys provided more evid ence for his long-standing emphasis on Dunbar's achievements in standard English as well as dialect. The new m anuscripts supported hi s efforts to portray th e authenticity of hi s predecessor's lan guage and th e ironies at the core of his sat ire. The partnership between the two poets strength ene d well and Martin felt ever-increased empathy with the problems Dunbar faced in his own times and that po et s continue to face. The shared values of these two partners became clearer than ever as we ll. Both wante d to expand th e audiences for poetry ; both esche wed snobbery and saw popularity as a de sirable goal and an admirable artistic achievement. Martin's scholarly find s intensified his already voracious appetite for exploring history and sent him off to do more literar y-hi storical and musical compositions of his own. The newly di scovered and un collected manuscripts by Dunbar provided reinforcem en t for hi s habit of counterpointing various media and art form s in hi s own creations. Scholarship on Dunbar also reassured the quiet warrior that it was possible and desirable to care deeply about issues but to address them w ith calm Dunbar and Martin in Their Ow n Voices

Martin at the Museum ofAf rican American History , Detroit, October 1997, with longtime friend, artist ja mes Born (left). Courtesy of Central Michigan University.

insight and subtle irony. No longer concerned about being teased or stigmatized by comparison with Dunbar, the kid from Alabama had grown up and began to worry more about measuring his own achievements against the considerable accomplishments of his mentor. Somehow Paul Laurence Dunbar and Herbert Woodward Martin, together and separately, have managed to continue speaking eloquently in his own voice. In his foreword to In His Own Words, Henry Louis Gates Jr. reaffirms Dunbar's contributions to the oral literary tradition in his own life . Recalling that his father recited Dunbar to him at bedtime, Gates notes that he also entertained his own children with "In the Morning" on the days he woke them up for school. And so Dunbar was passed down for generations before and after the 1972 centennial celebrations. In fact, Dunbar has been "anthologized in several ways" not only in major literary collections for over a century but also-as Gates notes-"by memorization, by word of mouth, by speakers" (xi). Key ingredients in that oral transmission have been Martin's one-man show as well as his textual scholarship. In noting the contributions of In His Own Voice, Gates addresses the major obstacles facing Martin's efforts over the past three decades. Performers and scholars seeking to reexamine Dunbar's reputation have had to con164

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tend with what Gates has called a "poetics of respectability," which caused many to shy away from dialect poems that came to be identified too exclusively with pathos and humor. At the same time Dunbar's works were often linked to the racist elements of minstrelsy and its embarrassing associates. Many Harlem Renaissance writers, for example, wanted to transcend, circumvent, or undermine what they felt was demeaning about the plantation school of poetry and minstrelsy. The previously uncollected works brought together in In His Own Voice add further evidence to Martin's longstanding contention that Dunbar himself was seeking to undermine the stereotypes within those traditions through irony and satire. In His Own Voice added some long missing pieces of the total picture that Martin had begun to draw three decades earlier. As Gates notes, the new collection enables readers "for the first time to consider the full range and sweep of Dunbar's talents" (xiv). Gates's assessment of the new volume describes well what Martin has done for Dunbar's place in American literature: "Pew publications alter literary history fundamentally, but that is the great accomplishment of this one" (xiv). The scholarly scavenger hunts and restoration of manuscripts in the 1990S had another effect on Martin's career. The rediscovery of Dunbar's musicals and operas spurred on his own experimentation with a variety of musical forms in the composition of The Logof the Vigilante. All this prepared Martin to embark upon his new career as an opera librettist.

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•9 •

A Sound Outside ofHis Head The Poet as Opera Librettist

For more than a half-century, Martin's personal and professional experiences prepared him for what he began to think of in 1996 as a new career as an opera librettist. It was one year after the premier of PaulLaurence Dunbar: A Common Ground, an opera that had been received well by audiences and critics alike. The Dayton Opera Company had commissioned the work on the life of Dunbar, with Martin as librettist for the music of Virginia composer Adolphus Hailstork. The next year Martin's second opera, It Paysto Advertise, with music by Phillip Magnuson, debuted in Dayton as well. On the eve of the first performance he reflected on the direction his career seemed to be taking: "I have come to libretto writing late in my career. There are no books out there to inform you on how it is done. One must work from scratch" (unpublished notes on the opera, manuscript in HWMP). While that may be true for each new project, his intuition for matching words and sounds had been sparked on Alabama playgrounds and churches in the 1940S; nurtured in church choirs in Toledo and New York City in the 1950S and 1960s; expanded in poetry readings and performances in musical theater in the 1970S and 1980s; and energized throughout by his abiding commitment to the spirituals, classical music, and the African American poetic tradition. "Librettos are like pieces of fiction," Martin has conjectured: first and foremost "you must tell a story and it ought to have some conflict and some resolution. One hopes that the characters you create are likeable, at first by the composer, and later by subsequent audiences" (notes in manuscript, HWMP). He works at this process of creation-much in the way he works to create poems, plan performances, rehearse for plays, and teach classes. Even more so, no doubt, than the variety of earlier art forms he took on, an • 166·

opera libretto is a collaborative effort requiring patience and compromise as well as a special form of surprise and exhilaration: "It is a rare privilege for a poet to hear his words set to sound outside of his head." Martin feels "blessed" when this happens, and he also disavows as publicity stunts the infamous "controversial fights so often reported between composer and librettist." The partnership between music and the word seems natural in his experience perhaps in part because he does not consider his words to be sacred: "I have not just come down the mountain with them" (notes in manuscript, HWMP). A lifetime of singing and composing prepared the way for Martin's songs and operas of the last decade. On the playgrounds of Alabama, he and his friends created and enacted religious ceremonies to mourn the passing of dead birds. In these early years, he chanted prayers, and began a lifetime of singing in church. In high school, he performed in choruses and took on featured solos in musical reviews and variety shows. More formal composing began early as well. When he was seventeen, he wrote a cycle of songs and prayers, "A Son of the Commandments" on the occasion of the Bar Mitzvah of Robert Allen Baron, a member of the Baron family of Toledo for whom his mother worked for more than three decades. Four years later he followed with "A Chorus from the Rock: For Voices," dedicated to Emmet Till, who was murdered in 1955. One of his earliest prize-winning poems, dedicated to the contralto Marian Anderson, hinted already how much his poetry later would be concerned with musical styles and themes. In 1959 he submitted his first opera libretto, Nathan, along with a group of poems and a one-act play, in application for a full scholarship to the Boulder, Colorado, Writer's Conference. (He was awarded the scholarship and attended the conference in 1960, where he studied with the late Karl Shapiro.) Plans for another opera earlier in the decade did not materialize. He had planned to turn his play Adam Self into an opera in collaboration with George Walker, a Pulitzer Prize winner (for Lilacs, based on Whitman's "When Lilacs ..."). "We were both young. Nothing ever came of the libretto," he recalls (notes in HWMP). A great deal did come, however, of all the other musical projects in these early years. His achievements in music-much like his considerable output in poetry and performance-developed not so much chronologically but more like a collage, an interlocking network of counterpointed art forms very much like the contrapuntal poetic forms he created. Each very different musical form he took on influenced his artistry on the whole. He sang solo and ensemble in churches and professionally. He performed Bach, the spirituals, and musicals from Celebration to Pippin. He included a wide variety of music from the African American tradition in his own poetry readings and later in A Sound Outsideof HisHead

his Dunbar show. He was in demand with symphony orchestras across the country, where he performed as narrator in Aaron Copeland's A Lincoln Portrait, William Walton's and Edith Sitwell's Parade, and William Grant Still's AfricanAmericanSymphony: NO.1, among others. He wrote songs for the music of New York composer Joseph Fennimore and his Dayton colleague Phillip Magnuson. The Martin-Fennimore songs have been performed and recorded widely for over three decades. He has also performed music on video and for community and civic groups where he has worked to demonstrate the inseparable links between written texts, poems in performance, and the word taking on life in that sound outside the poet's head. From American RecordGuide to the New York Times, reviews of Martin's work as a poet of song have been consistently favorable. The partnership forged with Dunbar-perhaps even the competition he has always felt-spurred on Martin's efforts in musical composition. Long a scholar of Dunbar's manuscripts, he studied his predecessor's travels to New York and London and his creation of plays and musicals. In live performance and on video he added spirituals and work songs to capture the tone and full context of Dunbar's poetry. He identified closely with Dunbar's poems about music such as "A Poet and His Song" and "When Malindy Sings." His Ohio Authors monograph on Dunbar is subtitled "A Singer of Songs" (1979 )-and he is fond of saying that his competitor/partner's greatest ambition was to be a maker of song that captured something of the daily lives and toils of his people. It is no wonder, then, that Martin's most abiding interest as a composer would relate to the life and times of Dunbar. For years he had been composing his own symphonies, singing portions of Dunbar's works juxtaposed with spirituals in his one-man show. Inevitably he would be the driving force behind the commission of Paul Laurence Dunbar: CommonGround (1995) by Dayton Opera, for which he selected the poems and wrote the additional lyrics for the music of his collaborator, Adolphus Hailstork. Martin also performed four Dunbar poems in March 1996 for the debut of the "Paul Laurence Dunbar Suite" with the Dayton Bach Society. Numerous other performances with the Dayton Bach Society and across the country from Mississippi to Arizona followed-as did Martin's own expanded repertoire of musical compositions from the opera It Paysto Advertise (1996) and "Magnificat" (1999), both with Magnuson. The chronology of Martin's career as a performer has run for a long time on several very different but related tracks. Still, he is headed in new directions where the signposts have been pointing for a long time. Again the unifying vision over time has been his counterpoint imagination. His teaching, poetry, theater, scholarship, and opera have influenced each other over 168

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time-often through juxtaposition and sometimes with smooth reinforcing links. His habit has been not only to try new forms but also to bring those very different forms into dialogical settings of conversation, contrast, and conflict where audiences are able to see and hear new insights because of innovative arrangements and rearrangements. Multiple perspective and collage have been the hallmarks, not only of his new contrapuntal forms created in the 1960s but of a career where various texts-on the page, on the stage, on video, and in music-come alive and interact. That kind of interaction continues to invite readers and listeners to not only take in the artistry but to release in themselves the power to interpret and to make their own poetry and music. His earliest musical creations are clearly young apprentice work, generally occasional pieces written to celebrate events and some creations that Martin says now he would "just as soon forget about." They are often formulaic and predictable in ways one expects from the inexperienced. While they are underdeveloped and suggest a student's sense of fulfilling an assignment, there are many early signs of what we come to see later as Martin's playfulness with words and his willingness to take risks within a range of conventional formats. Even in these very early years his desire to try everything created a mix of standard genres as he worked along the borders of the religious and secular, the tragic and comic, the structures of choral, solo, and opera. Already also there is an emphasis on dialogue and counterpoint creating effects that range from insurmountable conflict and misunderstanding to unexplainable love and endurance. For many years after she arrived in Toledo, Martin's mother worked as a domestic for the Baron family of Baron Steel. The young Herbert often accompanied his mother to work and became close friends (to this day) with several family members. To celebrate Bobby's thirteenth birthday and his bar mitzvah, Martin composed "A Son of the Commandments," a sequence of three songs and a dedication: "May in your future this day never be over. / Forever and ever be a constant guide through your life / with love hope and faith those are the things to be cherished. / It is a life to live and a life to give, / the joy of today and the sadness of tomorrow" (manuscript in HWMP). "Freedom" is the coming-of-age prayer: "He is born out of the night / and grows, grows into the light. / It has come! It has come ... / Rejoice! ! Rejoice for it is the thirteenth day of my birth." While this prayer of thanks may be overly exuberant, it sounds a trumpet blast of both thanks and resolve. The father no longer bears "responsibility" for sins as the son takes on the maturity and obligation of an adult. "Prayer of Manhood" asks for a life that will be "clean and unrepentable" and filled with "everlasting foresight." The song is plain: A Sound Outsideof HisHead

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Martin with his mother-and Odell in Toledo. j uly 1960 , in the ba ckyard of th e Barrons' hom e wh ere th ey all wo rked. Courtesy of the estate of Willie Ma e Martin.

"Through sorrow through grief and pain-/ leave one not, leave me not. " The ceremony concludes with "Thanks" to the mother who gave him birth and through whose love "there is delight. " With an eye to the hope of the future there is thanks "To you who has made me whole." The sanctity of these bar mitzvah prayer s is matched three years later in "A Chorus from the Rock : For Voices ," dedicated to fourteen-year-old Emmett Till , who was lynched in Mississippi, and Robert M . Peterson , Anton Schuessler, and John Schues sler, who were murdered in Chicago.The themes of this chorus are death, crucifixion , martyrdom, and salvation through the resurrection. A solo voice begins, "Sister Mary had but one child, born in Bethlehem, / and every time the Baby cried, she rocked him in the weary land / she rocked him in the weary land" (HWMP). This is a funeral ceremony ("we came to bury the dead") and a reminder that life raises "a bar of un / justice / un / just." Whether rocking the baby or rolling the rock over the tomb, life teaches but one lesson: "Death leads one to the Prime 170

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Truth / the / THE LORD GOD GIVETH / man / taketh / away." While "the bread of sacrifice" lived and died so that man could achieve immortality, there will always be martyrs and the cries of mothers and the pains of injustice: "0 America I love, love thee / but thou has hurt my heart / cut it clean of my soul / 0 my America / 0 my America." The long night is dark and dead and filled with despair ("He does not rise this morning. / The stone stays tight. / The Guard sleeps well this time / And at sunrise Mary sleeps too"), and this chorus sinks into a horrible dirge: "One is not enough for all / And all for one means we too shall die / PETITION GOD FOR ANOTHER SON / PETITION GOD FOR ANOTHER SON." The eye is open and shut, a picture is taken, the "recalcitrant hound" is hunted "till the kill." The rock seems to have been built upon sand, and the hills are silent-and yet here is hope in the resolve: "I will not hide upon the rock / I will go down / and if I leave but a measure of understanding behind me / I shall have given my all." And that giving might yet turn out and to be enough because "no man can do more than his god." The paradoxes and puns mount as the redemptive force takes over: "If we must have understanding / We must first under the rock stand." The answer turns out to be brutally simple, with trust that the shared martyrdom with the savior will triumph: "And the Son of Man has died once for all / He need not die again / I offer my life / that my brothers might walk / and this cup of salt be taken away." The voices of this chorus wait through the night and greet together the dawn "when the sun comes again." "A Chorus from the Rock" hurls endurance and resurrection in the face of despair in a tone reminiscent of Marian Anderson, who after being denied the opportunity to sing in Constitution Hall (by the Daughters of the American Revolution) was invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to perform at the steps the Lincoln Memorial. Ironically and tenaciously-as in this chorus-she sang "America, the Beautiful." Nathan (submitted with additional portfolio material) won Martin a full scholarship to the Boulder, Colorado, Writer's Conference in 1960. He wrote this, his first opera libretto, under the pseudonym William Paul Christ. Not yet an established author, Martin was a year away from his first reading at the New York City coffeehouse Les Deux Megots, where he took the name David Dave for his debut. He was also just three years away from the production of his one-act play A Dialogue in New York. Nathan reflects the existentialist angst of the time as well as the influence of Absurdist theater. While the language that it uses is often melodramatic and predictable, there are also flashes of fresh and gutsy talk reminiscent of the young Edward Albee, with whom Martin would study two years later. Jonathan and Leah Lord are a comfortable middle-aged couple thinking of retirement and about A Sound OutsideofHisHead

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to face the empty nest. Soon after the curtain rises, Jonathan sings about the helplessness of an aging man watching what he has built decay. His wife brings coffee, urges him to relax, and proclaims, "we shouldn't have to ponder the problem so hard." Together they sing about the need to let go. They exhaust themselves before becoming resigned to the joys of the inevitable: "Each man must roam. Each man must have his spree, so that what he accomplishes seems free" (HWMP). From this point on, the plot becomes entangled, somewhat rushed, and a little too formulaic. But the dialogue continually surprises with poetic tones and innovative twists that the scholarship committee no doubt found promising. Brothers John and Nathan do not get on well and have developed very different views of the world. John appears to be the good son or perhaps the placater who fits in; Nathan wants to roam. "I'm pretty well sure I'm doing what you long haven't had the nerve to do. This is what is really worrying you," he sings to his brothers as he packs his bags to leave. He needs to follow his destiny and leave the trifles behind. Their father plans to retire and let the boys run the business. Nathan says he must leave, while John decides he can do it all himself. Many sources are lurking in the background of these scenes: the story of the prodigal son, Arthur Miller's plays about fathers and sons, perhaps even some of the father-daughter scenes of Verdi's operas. Act 2 and five years later Nathan is living in a penthouse with his girlfriend of convenience, Miriam, where they are hosting a large group of shallow and boisterous friends. "What kind of complex have you?" The chorus asks repeatedly in a parody of psychoanalysis: "Is it the Othello, / Or maybe the Hamlet, / Or maybe the Romeo, / Or even the Omlet?" Were you in love with your mother? Father? Brother? Sister? "Do you express your subconscious? / Or are you prone to show your id / Or do you have an exhibiting libido? / And say the things you should keep hid?" The plot thickens further. A building manager appears to evict Nathan for not paying his bills. Nathan gets drunk and throws everyone out until at last his beloved Miriam goes off with someone else. Nathan hurls his empty glass at the light, which slowly dims as he calls out helplessly one more time, "Miriam." After a short curtain break, one year passes and we meet Nathan in his new role as a repentant sinner playing the organ in a church. At this point Martin's skillful manipulation of juxtaposed scenes creates dramatic stage business, crisp dialogue, and considerable counterpointed conflicts. Nathan sings of repentance ("Grant me thy true path of light that I may right my inward faults"). Juxtaposed with these penitential cries are two choruses: on the left are old friends who bring him up to date with nightmarish tales of murder and deceit; on the right are symbols of good172

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ness and forgiveness. Nathan is having dreams of terrors, but when he awakens the voices continue. Into this collage his parents merge with his mother singing, "My boy is good! My son is.good!" and his father pleading, "Come home, my child." The father's invitation is drowned out by the devilish cry of a loud chorus: "Alone, Alone." The chorus of the righteous makes one more plea: "Truth is the way to God. / And through such virtues are his graces obtained." Another year passes. Miriam has taken up with Gerald, and Nathan plays the organ in the church and volunteers to help wayward youth. Nonetheless, he is still trapped in "a void of unhappiness" and replies to all hopeful suggestions with "Impossible." Miriam and Gerald visit Nathan and plead with him to return home to his parents. He sings that it is not possible though he will write to them and tell them that he loves them and he is ... still alive, "but that is all." They tell him he seems to be punishing himself, but his reply reflects something closer to ennui: "Call it penance, cloistering, self-exile. I only feel that this must be as nothing else has had to be." Still and forever definite and stubborn, he rebukes Miriam. The opera ends with a contrapuntal duet of sorts that softens and fades. "I am sorry for you; above all others I would have thought you would understand," Nathan sings, and then he buries himself in the solace of the organ. As he plays "a slow pianissimo" that moves to a "stable, sweet melodic line," he tells Miriam, "I am sorry" as she sings "Good bye my Nathan. A memory in the mind does not pass with the wind, and love does not die because man might sin." The lights fade out on a silhouetted Nathan alone. While the plot is crowded and overly dramatic, there is something haunting in the counterpoint views of life building a wall of isolation and angst around Nathan. The curtain comes down on a senseless, inexplicable, yet believable character who has failed both in sinning and repenting to escape an aloneness of his own making. Experimental, unpolished, and unsophisticated, Nathan is a young writer's passionate transition from the existentialist fifties to the explosive sixties. After Martin moved to New York he continued to sing in churches such as the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (Central Park West at 65th Street), where on April 9, 1963, he sang in the chorus of Bach's "The Passion According to St. Matthew." In addition to singing regularly at Holy Trinity, he performed other solo and ensemble engagements at churches from Rockport, Massachusetts, to Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Buffalo, where he narrated Bornemann's "Reformation 60/70" with the Lutheran Chorale of Buffalo. In between his job at World Publishing Company in the early sixties and his poetry readings at Les Deux Megots, he continued to write nonmusical A Sound Outsideof HisHead

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theater as well as poems. He also took classes in poetry, theater, and music. While in New York City, at Breadloaf, in Buffalo, and in Grand Rapids, Michigan' he acted in a variety of plays, and his next big musical breakthrough occurred when he began to write songs in the late 1960s with the rising New York composer Joseph Fennimore. Among the first of many notable products of a collaboration that grew over the next twenty years was a performance at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1971. The Village Voice (May 27,1971),reviewing a program of Fennimore's music, singled out the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins as bringing out the composer's best, "but the sex-and-love poems of Herbert Woodward Martin were equally able, with the campy one about cruising Third and Lexington Avenues treated seriously and movingly." The Musicfournal reviewer found Martin's songs "vocally gratifying" and "mildly dissonant." Fennimore's own career has taken off over the years-from his founding of the "Hear America First" series featuring American composers at the New York Cultural Center (and on National Public Radio) to his own solid reputation as a composer of opera.' Fennimore and soprano Jane Bucci performed songs by Martin in Dayton in March 1979, and Fennimore presented his own piano music in Albany in November 1981 with Martin's poems (according to one reviewer) "interspersed throughout the concert adding deft touches of spice and flavor to the musical selections offered."2 In addition, Martin and Fennimore collaborated on "Woolworth Man."3 "Listen to me, Woolworth Man," the song begins: "Who do you think needs a store-bought boy / That's got a price tag on his leg / Who you thinks anxious to possess a pretty toy? / Me? Huh! Your thinking's mighty wrong." Reviewing a performance of this song, Daniel Goldberg found a combination of American rag and a "jaunty, rhythmic base line that culminated in dissonant, searing climaxes" (Kite, November 25, 1981). The smooth meshing and counterpoint contrasts of Martin's words and Fennimore's music has won them frequent rave reviews. But they are not always in total agreement, and watching them learn from each other is instructive and interesting. In a letter to Martin in December 1998 Fennimore tells him he is "struggling" with his poem "Morning." Fennimore wants to change the title to "Barrio" because "that is what I would evoke in my setting. In Grenada, not San Juan." Martin writes back that "it's OK what you call the song. After all, the setting is your own creation."4 Fennimore also shares some additional opinions and advice. "I do not refer to dramaturgy but sound and consonant coagulation," he begins. In most opera singing today, the way words and music come together is based on the Italian language. When singers deviate from those patterns, the result is either poor 174

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diction or vocal discomfort for singers. "How do you think about this?" he asks Martin. Fennimore comments on Virgil Thompson, Benjamin Britten, and German Expressionism before concluding: "In English, since the Elizabethans-who did not sing and in the Italian style-we have not had poets who can literally sing and who understand or consider the problems of vocal production." Martin responds that he feels taken "to task" by Fennimore's "marvelous statement on the process of writing songs, maybe even operas." He tells his collaborator that he does not think differently when he is writing poetry or a libretto. In both he hears "a musical tone to the words I write." He agrees with Tennessee Williams's view that "we speak with a particular music in our heads." He credits Whitman for hearing the Italianate sound (he loved bel canto especially). Martin goes on to cite Eliot, Pound, Dickinson, Richard Wilbur, Dylan Thomas, and Gertrude Stein as influences on his songs. Fennimore had ended his letter with "For words to be beautiful in sound, might it be because they would sound beautiful if sung? I think so. And then there is rhythm." There is a kind of symmetry to Martin's indirect response that closes his letter five days later: "A few poets do understand the act of song, although you wouldn't know it the way they read so sloppily. Still the first rate ones do understand the principle of music and how it generates and underpins their words. Every now and again a great poem appears before my eyes and I rejoice that someone else has succeeded at the impossible again" (HWMP). This example of an exchange between composer and librettist underscores how often music is built into Martin's poems as he composes, revises, and performs his texts. As he writes or reads, he hears the musical tones and waits on the phrases that make sense. "I think one must read for sense, and not simply to the end of the line and start again," he tells Fennimore. "That way lies madness and gives poetry a bad name and makes every student hate the art form." He also has a question for his composerpartner and fellow performer: "I hear a musical tone to the words I write. Tone as much as any other element conveys meaning whether spoken or sung, don't you think?" (HWMP). Listening to all these questions and observations from a creative team play out in their work is fascinating-and nowhere perhaps can we hear them work it out better than in the recording TheMusicofJoseph Fennimore, which includes three songs by Martin (interspersed with songs by Sappho and William Blake and an anonymous early sixteenth-century song writer)." Martin wrote the three songs recorded on The Music ofJoseph Fennimore (1988) in the midseventies, when they were grouped as the cycle "Love's Traces" (HWMP). "Winterlove" recalls a brief time when "I did love and you did love / And we did love together, / And I A Sound Outsideof HisHead

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did love and you did love / And we did warm December." But when the spring comes, the singer takes to wandering and they say their good-byes. He asks her to "please remember" that "I did love and you did love / And we did warm the winter." In another winter love song, "The Snow Grew out of the Sky Last Night," the singer celebrates the snow's "quality of remaking dreams." The snow is soft like stars yet weighted down with water and has those magical abilities to "bind up traffic, to send the children wildly into the streets." For a while yet the snow will warm the early emerging bulb, and it will continue "to grow falling down." But again it is the spring that brings loss as the rain washes away the snow to move the land from grief to spring's "burst of green and yellow relief." Juxtaposed between two of Martin's poems on the recording is William Blake's "Infant Joy." "I am but two days old," says the happy baby, "I happy am, joy is my name." The singer proclaims, "I sing the while, sweet joy be fall thee," in counterpoint with the next song, Martin's "Now Death Has Shut Your Eyes." At the point of death, the singer mourns, "Your hair grew long and lovely. / It was the last of your beauty I knew." Now peace has "shut your eyes" and "you have breathed your soul free," and the singer is afraid to carry her to "some simple earthly place / Lower you down to leave you there." These songs are radiantly simple. They dazzle with Emily Dickinson-like surprising turn of phrase. They break off crisply with Ezra Pound's clean, precise tools. The repetition seems exactly right, the emotion understated, the formal tone appropriately dignified. Martin created two other song cycles with Fennimore in the mid-rczos, and these were the lyrics most closely tied to his published poetry. "A Song and Four Prayers" (1975-76) and "November Songs" (1975) include poems from Martin's book ThePersistence ofthe Flesh (1976). The November poems were written during what he called his "Mt. Pleasant, Michigan period" and were dedicated to his students in the fall of 1973 while he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at Central Michigan University. TheShit-Storm Poems had just been published, he was performing in a reader's theater production of TheSirensof Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, and he was in rehearsal for the role of the narrator in William Walton's and Edith Sitwell's Facade with the Central Michigan University Chamber Orchestra. "November Songs" are again-like "Love's Traces" -winter love stories. "November I" celebrates the marriage of rain and wind: "Sometime, in the night, / The wind boldly opened my door and came in. / the rain refused to follow and went away." The previous evening was, of course, Halloween, and "this morning" is the day of all saints, and across the drab mid-Michigan fields "the wind scurries over the heads of grass" shaking the Queen Anne's Lace and climbing up and through a tree. But all is not well in the melancholy marriage, and the 176

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sun rises to offer consolation: "But the wind runs on / Looking for the rain" (Persistence, 32). "November 2" and the rain comes back now looking for the wind which has vanished into "the blank trees" which held among them the stone of sorrow. Leaving behind only "traces like mirrors," the wind is driven on by grief. Nature at this all-hallows-eve and all-souls time of year stirs memories of loss, and the theme of mourning is continued in the closing poem of the cycle, "November 3," addressed to a friend who had died in winter some years before: "Leonard, today / I heard Phyllis' voice in a bookstore." It was only the pain of winter, however, as "fear took me by the shoulders / Turned me to see, but she was not there." In May 1999 Martin drew attention to a major influence on his poetry, drama, and song. He recalled a book that had impressed him for more than forty years: SelectedPoems and New by Jose Garcia Villa, a poet who possessed what Dame Edith Sitwell called"a great, even astonishing, and perfectly original gift" (preface to Selected Poems and New ix). Villa was the author as well of HaveCome, Am Here (1942) and Volume Two (1949). He was born in the Philippines and educated at the University of New Mexico and Columbia. He was teaching at City College in New York when Martin lived and worked there in the early sixties. Villa's innovation and his musicality caught Martin's attention and prompted him to experiment with line breaks, punctuation, and rhythms that eventually led to his invention of the contrapuntal genre. Villa's language was fresh and always surprising. He developed the crispness of Emily Dickinson, the clean and brittle measure of Ezra Pound, the rhythms and the reverence of work songs and spirituals. His poetry appealed to the young Martin's playfulness and theatricality and stayed with him as the counterpointed elements of his artistry matured. As Martin turned to writing songs in the 1970S and then again in the 1990S, Villa's influence resurfaced. "It is truly amazing that I found Jose Garcia Villa's Selected Poems. Dame Sitwell introduces him, and she is a master of curious and subtle rhythms" (letter to the author, May 19, 1999). At the time Martin was packing boxes to deliver more material to the collection of his papers at the Canaday Center of the University of Toledo. His daughter, Sarah, had just gotten married earlier in the week, and he found out that he was to be off to London to teach drama in the University of Dayton, London, English program. Many poems were in the works ("I plan to take a ton of submissions with me for various magazines"), he was a month away from winning first prize in the Piccadilly Poets Performance Contest-and Jose Garcia Villa was on his mind. A brief look at why Villa impressed Martin provides insights into the emergence of the contrapuntals in the 1960s. From his earliest readings at Les Deux Megots and in the Antigone cycle and the contrapuntals of New A Sound Outsideof HisHead

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York the Nine Millionand OtherPoems through the prayer cycle in The Persistenceof the Flesh, Martin's short poems displayed crisp images, sparse language, and counterpointed voices. Villa describes some of that quality in his own terms: "The method may be compared to Seurat's architectonic and measured pointillism-where the points of color are themselves the medium as well as the technique of expression" (Selected Poemsand New 81).6 Villa recommends reading the poems once through ignoring his abundance of commas if they seem to get in the way. Then, he suggests, compare the "comma'ed" to the "non-comma'ed" version to hear how this "strange innovation" works. Martin admired and employed in his own readings what Villa called a comma pause that is shorter than that "commended by its prose use." To shorten the pause he omits the usual space after a comma resulting in "a lineal pace of dignity and movement" (81). Martin was attracted as well to the sprightliness of Villa's phrases and the contrasts he sneaked in with regularity: "First, a poem must be magical," says Villa and "Then musical as a sea-gull. / It must be a brightness moving / And hold secret a bird's flowering" (HaveCome, Am Here 12). Villa's "Girl singing. Day. And on her way / She has to pass by the oldest mountain. / That at least is certain. Rain" (17) affords some of the possibilities of rhyme debated by librettists and composers. "The way my ideas think me / Is the way I unthink God," proclaims the singer sounding like a librettist who is working with a composer: "As in the name of heaven I make hell / That is the way the Lord says me" (41). And here is how the language sings in Lyric 57, called by Dame Edith Sitwell "a strange poem of ineffable beauty" and" one of the most wonderful short poems of any time": "0 thou in my breast so stark and / Holy-bright. 0 thou melancholy / Light. Me. Me. My own perfidy. / 0 my most my most. 0 the bright / The beautiful the terrible Accost" (45). Sitwell finds in Villa's love poems "a strange luminosity" bearing a "certain resemblance to that in the works of Blake"-the poet not so coincidentally paired with Martin in one of Joseph Fennimore's song cycles. Finally, he is taken perhaps most of all with Villa's playfulness and irreverence: "Then the marriage of our true minds must / Certainly be not. / Therefore we must get married. / We must get married in great delay. / We must get married as soon as not possible" (225). The inventor of the contrapuntal poem and composer of many short lyrics and song cycles was moving steadily toward the opera libretto as an art form shaping an amalgamation of his lyrical, dramatic, and musical talents. Martin showed an abiding interest also in the fire of Villa's poems-a fire he tried to capture in his song cycles project "Seven Poems," a collaboration with composer Phillip Magnuson that premiered in September 1992 at the 178

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opening of the new Sears Recital Hall in Dayton. "Fire Sings a Song" opens the cycle, and again the "trembling light" blazes with Martin's counterpointing of contrasts. The song wavers and fluctuates as the "heat inhales cold oxygen" and "exhales warm carbons." Stand "at a cautious distance," the reader is exhorted as the logs click in measured music and the fractured flames call to come closer in toward "the seductive hearth" and to "the rhythms of its enticing light." "Man Woman," a round for soprano and baritone, follows with the speculation "I thought as we were walking opposite ways / One of us might have turned, called to the other." That is exactly what does happen-or not, depending on which route the lines take-in the contrapuntal for the same two singers that follows. Again consider the possibilities for contrast, interaction, and synchronized duet: Now we are of particular hope, prisoners. Swift, fall leaves the stone-walk. We claw up essential ladders. We walk down as autumn. Unlike the spoken contrapuntals, where readers may imagine the flow in directions of their choice, here Magnuson's music suggests blending more than contrast. The remaining songs in this Magnuson-Martin cycle include love poems, prayers, and monologues drawing on African American work songs and blues. "Black woman singing alone" mourns the loss of her husbandman who worked the railroad and now "dreams in the sweet cold earth" where he "weeps and mourns no more." The blues song "Early in the Week" moves from "Monday comes all too soon" to "Tuesday lasts too long" to "Saturday night's the time to sing my song." The soprano sings in "When You Are Gone" that she will remember "how well you sang" and how nothing could prepare her for the loss. The baritone then proclaims that her silence "Waltzes me in three-quarter time." He, too, senses how fleeting their dance time will be: "this pulse we have left / Is the pulse of our / familiar address." Finally, as he has done so often in his books, "Seven Songs" closes with a prayer-this one for boy treble and three sopranos: "The curve of the hand / The joints of the fingers / The dome of the palm / Is a place of prayer / Where all grief is released / Where all truth is compounded." Over the next few years, Martin was much in demand as a performer as well, narrating"A Lincoln Portrait" with the Dayton Philharmonic and turning once again to the poetry of Dunbar-performing "Three Dunbar Poems" and then "The Paul Laurence Dunbar Suite" with the Dayton Bach Society A Sound Outsideof HisHead

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as well as the Dunbar poems in William Grant Still's "African American Symphony" in several locations nationally. In the Dunbar Suite, Martin performed Dunbar poetry accompanied by the choral settings of Robert James Huskings, Philip M. Magnusson, Robert D. Neal, and Steven Wittenberg. Two decades of composition for song cycles as well as musical performances led the way inevitably for yet another Dunbar-Martin partnership, On April 12, 1994, Dayton Opera commissioned a new one-act opera on the life and work of Paul Laurence Dunbar to be created by composer Adolphus Hailstork, with Martin as librettist. The two Dayton laureates and their Virginia musician colleague were at work on yet another new project. Because the opera was commissioned for performances in schools throughout Ohio, the creative team faced several constraints. They needed to keep the work short, the sets portable, and the story line clear and understandable without a great deal of dialogue. What composer Hailstork called an "operatic songfest" rather than an opera opened to a full house and rave reviews on February 10, 1995. Running time was thirty-five minutes, the set was stark and could travel easily-as it did in well in over eighty additional performances in schools and community centers throughout Ohio. Twelve Dunbar poems formed the basis of the text with additional material written by Martin. Dayton Opera artists in residence performed along with a sixteen-piece orchestra. Opening night the opera included performances by the Central State University Chorus and the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company II as well as additional poetry performed by Martin. The premier took place in Dayton's Victoria Theater, where Dunbar's own high school commencement ceremony had taken place on June 16, 1891. Martin's role as librettist was pivotal, even though the additional connecting links and biographical material that he wrote were minimal. Martin worked closely with Hailstork to communicate his understanding of the musical dimensions of Dunbar's work from a performer's perspective. The city eagerly awaited a new opera about one of its most famous residents. The Oakwood Register (January 31, 1995) announced "City Awaits World Premier of Dunbar Opera." To commemorate Dunbar's high school graduation on the same stage as the opera's debut, the evening's planner selected a Victorian theme and invited all in attendance to a reception at the Metropolitan Arts Center next door. Reviews were very strong. Mark Stryker in the Dayton Daily News called the music "generous with its soaring melodies, piquant harmonies, and muscular rhythms." He noted as well how the opera "winked at Dunbar's dialect poems by letting blues intervals and syncopated rhythms seep almost imperceptibly into the score; a clever clarinet obbligato or growling brass instrument seemed hiding around every 180

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corner."? An article in the Dayton Voice singled out two showstoppers: "Little Brown Baby" sung as a lullaby and a "duet by the tenor and baritone to 'Jump Back, Honey, Jump Back"'8 For Martin, working on Common Ground advanced several of his longstanding career goals. The production brought poetry and opera to thousands of people who had never experienced either in performance. The dialogue he wrote to link songs revealed a great deal about Dunbar's family life, his parents, his marriage, and his untimely death at thirty-three. Martin believed that Dunbar's poems were just waiting for "a sympathetic composer like Adolphus Hailstork," who is "in tune with their nature, their special song" (Dayton Voice, February 9,1995,10). In the program notes for the opening, "Making a Libretto," Martin adopts Dunbar's persona and offer a few remarks: "I hear my lyric anew with complete surprise and my hymns touch the soul with a freshness and the delights of speech: both dialect and standard still evoke the undercurrent of humor which is so essential to our daily existence" (HWMP). The twelve songs in the opera are a partnership between Dunbar and Hailstork, who has remarked, "When I discovered Dunbar's work, I realized that he was my artistic ancestor because I write music that reflects a double cultural experience, that of my standard European-oriented education and that of my ethnic heritage."9 Martin acknowledged that Hailstork was "in tune" with the "special song" already in the nature of Dunbar's poems. "What we tried to do," Martin noted, "is to suggest that there is a kind of common pursuit and struggle that's related to everyone's life. We wanted to capture the atmosphere and the tone of Dunbar's reaction to the world around him" ("New Opera Delivers" 11). Martin's role involved writing additional material that would link the songs to each other and make the larger connections about Dunbar's life for audiences coming to his works for the first time. He had several goals in mind. Newcomers to Dunbar would experience how"clever and ingenious he was," while those already familiar with his work could experience anew "the lasting efforts he's created, how well he created his characters, and how alive they all are" ("New Opera Delivers" 10). At the opening Martin observed how "over and over again Dunbar's lyrics lend themselves to a particular kind of reading or melody" (HWMP). Dunbar had been his guide for over twenty years of performances and he was again for the opera: "He was right on the mark and had a marvelous ear." Director Mikell Pinkney pointed out how Hailstork's music captured the spirituality, the sense of the old South and the genteel manners of Dayton at the turn of the last century. The production PaulLaurence Dunbar:Common Ground by WPTD (Dayton A Sound OutsideofHisHead

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Public Television) began with a retrospect on Dunbar's life and on Dayton in the late 1800s, where the work of the Wright Brothers and the Pattersons of National Cash Register fame and Paul Laurence Dunbar made Dayton seem a cultural Mecca as complex and energetic as Vienna. The opera begins with a short overture and an excerpt from "Ode to Ethiopia": "Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul; / Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll / In characters of fire" (HWMP). This background material prepares for the tenor proclaiming "Because I have loved so deeply / Because I have loved so long / God in his great compassion gave me the gift of song." Brief narrative links inform the audience of details of Dunbar's life in the context of the times of his birth in 1872. A formal reprise of "Gave me the gift of song" is counterpointed with the jaunty rhythms of "A Love Letter" in a contrapuntal with the tenor singing about his "sweetheart named Sal" alongside a chorus of ladies commenting on his stories. "A Frolic" follows with a dance, a chorus, and playful orchestration: "Swing you' lady roun' an' roun' / Do de bes' you know." The lush love ballad "The Awakening" again changes the mood: "I did not know that life could be so sweet, / I did not know the hours could speed so fleet / Till I knew you, and life was sweet again." The song is Dunbar's standard-English lyric at its best with orchestration highlighting the richness of feeling in "I was a slave a few short days ago" and "I would not be again in bondage, save / I had you smile, the liberty to crave." With no transition' a powerful duet emerges of "Thou art my life, by thee I sing / My being is attuned to thee." The song is treated as a contrapuntal duet with the soprano and tenor alternating stanzas and then resolving together "My petition cannot fall; / For I'm already one with thee!" ("Thou Art My Lute"). A brief pause documents in spoken narrative the circumstances of Dunbar's birth and how he came to be named Paul. "Little Brown Baby" is staged as a tour-de-force tenor soliloquy with shifting musical tone and melody to match the spectrum of moods in the poem: "Little brown baby wif' spaklin eyes / Who's pappy's darlin' an' who's pappy's chile?" The song is a show stopper in every way from the dramatization of "My, you's a / scamp" to the poignant "Wisht you could all us know ease an cleah skies; / Wisht you could stay jes' a chile on my breas.'" The mother brings him the baby at the powerful conclusion of the song and then he breaks away in counterpoint style again to a rousing version of "A Negro Love Song." In the choreographed number with jazz music background the two characters act out the narration of "Seen my lady home las' night, / Jump back, honey, jump back"-ending with a rousing enactment of the concluding lines: "Love me honey, love me true? / Love me well ez I love you? / An' she answe'd 'Cose I do' / Jump back, honey, jump back." In his own Dunbar show Martin has 182

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referred to this song as a forerunner of some forms of rap music, and the staging here bears this out. As they walk off, two ladies perform a parallel song, "Seen you down at ch'rch las' night, / Nevah min,' Miss Lucy," with its overtones of gossip and rumor. "Accountability" receives an elaborate though brief staging with lush choral background to advance the text: "we is all constructed diff'ent, d' ain't no two of us de same." The text breaks off quickly, and the brief excerpt serves as an antechamber for the major production that follows as a seamless transition moves from a congregation and a choir to a preacher delivering "An Ante-Bellum Sermon." It is a dramatic staging in a call-andresponse pattern with rhythmic choral background and sharp contrasts in the preacher's emphasis on freedom alongside his disclaimers that "I'm talkin' 'bout ouah freedom / In a Biblistic way." In spite of the ironies and masks Dunbar created, the music, staging, and acting underscore that the poet's emphasis was that the Lord would "Set his people free." Though the sermon is often raucous, it ends most seriously and moves directly to perhaps the most solemn aria in the opera. "He Had His Dream," the wellknown poem often thought of as a forerunner of Dr. Martin Luther King's famous speech: "He had his dream, and all through life, / Worked up to it through toil and strife." Narrative threads spin out of this song to explain the title of the opera-that we all share the common ground of struggle in our lives: "All men and women have to struggle / That ground is common to us all. / It was for Dunbar / It is for you / It will be for your descendants." With that unifying transition, the orchestra introduces the ensemble for the conclusion of "He Had His Dream": "He saw through every cloud as a gleam-/ He had his dream," followed by additional spoken dialogue on Dunbar's life and achievements, after which the audience is invited to join with Dunbar in his determination to overcome obstacles. The ensemble closes with the tribute that "God in His great compassion / Gave me the gift of song." A blackout is followed by rolling credits on the video and a voice over reprise of "I will pause right hyeah to say,/ Dat I'm still a-preachin' ancient, / I ain't talkin' 'bout today" ("An Ante-Bellum Sermon"). The background chorus repeats the reverent tones, and the orchestration is rich as the preacher's, "Cause I isn't; I'se a-judgin' / Bible people by deir actions." All these ironies emphasize the equivocation of Dunbar's work as captured in this opera. The impression as the opera ends is that we have been treated to a small sampling of the abundance that is Dunbar's poetry-the humor and the irony, the poignant love songs, choral complexity of multiple voices contrasting and blending. From "Jump Back Honey" and "Never Mind Miss Lucy" to the solemnity of "Be proud my Race, in mind and soul" and "He A Sound OutsideofHisHead

Had His Dream," Paul Laurence Dunbar: Common Ground provides an introduction to the range of music Dunbar created. Martin's participation in this project contributed a great deal to his career-long goal of enlarging audiences for poetry and empowering new communities of readers, listeners, and performers. Over its nine-year history, Dayton Opera's artist-inresidence program has introduced opera to over 130,000 audience members of the future. The poetry, Martin concludes, in proper notes, is extraordinarily singable. The poems come ready-made with "an inordinate amount of music" already in them. He hopes the new audiences will find the music "charming" and "accessible," a "coherent piece that makes sense right away" (HWMP). Reviewer Mark Stryker summarized audience reactions to the debut: "The only true disappointment in Paul Laurence Dunbar: Common Ground . . . is that at 35 minutes long there isn't enough of it" (Dayton Daily News, February 11,1995). While working on the opera with Hailstork, Martin created an alternate version called The Gift of Song: The Death of Paul Laurence Dunbar. That version was not used and remains an unpublished manuscript (HWMP). The central characters in this fragment besides Dunbar are his mother and his wife, Alice, and the action focuses on Dunbar's death and a series of flashbacks. In the opening scene a reporter comes to Dunbar's home to learn the details of his death. His mother, Matilda, tells the reporter that he died of "consumption ... and a broken heart," that what he accomplished "in his short life was nothing short of a miracle," and that "he never knew it but he was a mighty influence." She sings "Be proud, my Race ..." from Dunbar's "Ode to Ethiopia." She recalls how she and her husband, Joshua, argued over what to name their new baby, and Joshua sings "Little Brown Baby." Matilda sends Paul's former wife a message asking her to come because he is dying. Downstage in a pool of light Alice is shown ripping up the telegram. In a flashback Dunbar announces that he is tired of school, but his mother insists that he keep going to achieve what "no one can ever take away," and she sings "Because I had loved so deeply.... " The action moves swiftly through his courtship with Alice Moore, the difficulties of their marriage, his worsening illness and attempts to recover in Colorado. Additional songs are interspersed including "Accountability" and "A Love Letter," but their positioning seems less smooth in the plot here than it is in the more loosely organized song-cycle style of Common Ground. The last two scenes are very dramatic and suggest directions for some elements that did find their way into Common Ground. Dunbar dies and then gets up to address the audience: "I am not so sure I should have told you all this ... but I have always had to struggle. All men and women have to struggle. The 184

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ground is common to us all." He reprises "He Had His dream," and then Alice and Mrs. Dunbar close the opera with spoken dialogue ("Against the odds he succeeded with my encouragement. He was the only black student in a class of forty-three to receive a high school diploma. Regardless of the set backs, we must stand and face the storm, for a better day is coming") and sing of the bards who "proudly tune their lyrics to sing / Of Ethiopia's glory" ("Ode to Ethiopia"). While TheDeathofPaulLaurence Dunbar remains an unproduced fragment, it does gloss how the structure and themes of Common Ground emerged. Less than two months after the debut of PaulLaurence Dunbar: Common Ground, Martin wrote that he was at work on his second opera and that Virginia Opera had also asked him to do a libretto for a third. He had just returned from Cleveland, where he had delivered the keynote speech for the National College English Association meeting. He had performed the Dunbar show: "All went well and I had a very responsive audience. Slowly but surely my name and the program are getting around. It has taken severa I light years, but wouldn't you know that when I am ready to retire it all falls into place?" (letter to the author, April 2, 1995). At the time he was increasing his workload to create one of the busiest "ready-to-retire" schedules imaginable. "February was a hectic month with the opera and a ton of readings," he notes. He had also just returned from St. Croix, where he performed Dunbar and lectured on reading dialect (it "would make a delightful place to retire"). The Dunbar video had led to many more performances and visits to schools: "Now with the opera, there are more invitations. I suddenly need a secretary." At the same time he is teaching and "trying to write poems and get them in the mail and keep them there until someone accepts them." In between operas and about four years away from several major successes, he seemed tired and discouraged: "It is truly a jungle out there because unless you are high profile no one is going to take a chance." Even with many successes and a growing reputation, the odds seem to be getting worse: "There are a million good poets and 250 thousand first rate poets writing in English so the glass ceiling is hard to crack.... I am still struggling with the contest route and that is costly, different, and depressing" (letter to the author, April 2, 1995). While the contest route and the poems-in-the-mail strategies would payoff well over the next few years, the next project would be much-needed comic relief in the whimsical opera It Paysto Advertise (1996). Originally Martin and his University of Dayton colleague Phillip Magnuson planned an opera in the format of a talk show. Exploring an alternative format, Martin returned to "The Deodorants," a playfully satiric poem A Sound Outsideof HisHead

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he had written in the late 1970S. He gave Magnuson a variation entitled "Yodoro, Tussy, Mitchum, and Brut" to keep him "at bay" while he was "doing other things." Magnuson liked the poem and began immediately to set the piece to music. After sharing further his ideas for the opera he read Martin's libretto only to discover they were not thinking along the same lines. "But I guess it didn't matter," notes Magnuson "because I liked what he had written a lot better" (news release, University of Dayton, October 22, 1996). It Pays to Advertise opened at the University of Dayton's Kennedy Union Boll Theater on November 9, 1996. The fast-paced story takes place over two days in twentyfive scenes involving four central characters and a host of deodorant characters who sing on and off the television screen. The plot unfolds in a series of symmetrically paired arias and duets and in combative recitatives. The parallels are often so tight and neat as to poke fun at operatic conventions as they unfold. In many ways the conflicts and the parallels suggest the contrapuntal pattern of surprising merger and sharply contrasted juxtaposition. Yodora, Tussy, Mitchum, and Brut appear throughout the work as a chorus to advance the story and comment ironically on many events. Their opening "Once Upon a Time" is sung on the television screen and introduces us to Bella, who is "persistent and consistent," "had a command of a phrase," and became a high-profile lawyer-and David, who is "ambitious and loquacious" and became a high-profile advertising writer. They were destined to meet, and they "fell in love" and "fell in marriage" (HWMP). Growing rich together was easy, "but in the process they lost their passion / In a split level house." We also meet the servant Nachelle and the butler, Nicholas; "And they all lived together / In a split level house." The first big aria is an ensemble of the four characters who pick up on the ironies of "This Is Not a Home." For some time they enjoyed companionship and even love: "But something went wrong: / We forgot the words to our song." Contrapuntal-style, Bella and David come to the realization that they achieved much but got it all too soon and their home became merely their "retreat at day's end." Nachelle and Nicholas, the servants, also know and tell too much, sing over the couple's duet: "They sleep here; / Once upon a time. / They eat here; / Once upon a time. / They loved here; / It's not a home." Then they all sing together once again "Where is the passion we (they) once had? / Where are the artifacts that made us (them) glad?" This is an exciting opening scene that sets in motion the sense of loss in the opera, and the problem becomes the question of whether they can ever recover what they once had together. Two parallel dialogues follow, each paired with an aria that prepares the way for a possible solution. First Bella and Nachelle expound on the prob186

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lem "Where did love go?" Perhaps in the big house they just "misplaced it" in one of the "unused rooms." In the end it seems the problem is that "work became the thing" and loving stopped. In a subplot Nachelle tells Bella, "I wish I could be you for a minute," but the lawyer reminds her that treading the line between winning and losing and trying to "discover those things which are truly important" takes a lot out of her. In the aria "Winning," Bella reviews how we twist and turn and tug and pull because "the corporate world wants a winner." In a parallel dialogue David and Nicholas do their own version of the what-happened-to-love discussion-"Where is the generous love she used to dispense?" David asks. In another subplot Nicholas wishes that he had his boss's "clever abilities for saying the right words to persuade, to convince, and to sell people the products they don't even want or need." Whereupon David's counterpoint to Bella's "Winning" bursts forth in the aria "Selling," in which he assures all, "I can make you fill out a blank and order / Senseless and useless things you do not want." The battle scene shifts in Dialogue III to Bella and David arguing and each telling the other, "I suppose you think you could do my job better than I can." This leads to their decision to exchange jobs. Bella will take Nicholas to work with him, and Bella agrees that David should take Bella ("She wants to be me anyway"). The swap takes place the next day where each will give the other "twentyfour hours to do what I can do in one day." From here on out the scenes are crisper and move more rapidly. Day One closes back on the television screen where "Cola Wars" are waging: "Coca Cola came to town, / Diet Pepsi shot him down, / Dr. Pepper patched him up / Guess who's chasing Seven-Up?" Day Two begins with David working in the law office, Brut on the ad screen, and Yodoro peddling personal injury law suits. In rapid-fire scenes David's legal brief sounds like ad copy, Yodoro and Tussy invite viewers to Dial a Psychic, and Bella hates writing ads for "soft drinks which taste alike," "appliances that self-destruct in your hands," and "deodorants that refuse to deodorize or apologize." Matchmaker ads ("Silk") are followed by "Music Digest" which makes "the world's most famous melodies / Easy to manage, easy to digest" to save customers"countless hours / of needless listening." The appeal is earnest: "If you have never cared for / classic, Romantic, or / A dissonance or two / These melodies will melt you heart / Shoo be do, do be do." In his most irreverent and caustic satiric mode, Martin presents "great composers and their hits" condensed" and "deranged" into "unrecognizable compact form": "Claire de Lune (what a tune) / Minute Waltz (lots a schmaltz) / Humoresque (it's the best) / Fur Elise (0 what a piece) / Midsummer Night (it's a dream) / La A Sound OutsideofHisHead

Boheme (that's a gem) / Rite of Spring (scary thing)." In its offering of early digested, saleable distortions of genuine art, "Music Digest" epitomizes the opera's persistent quest to discover where love has gone. Described in parallel narratives aptly named "Trials" and "Tribulations," the couples' day at their new jobs does not go well. David's legal brief turns out to be "just one more silly ad." Bella concludes that "written commercials / simply makes no sense." That afternoon a free-for-all breaks out involving Bella, Nachelle, David, and Nicholas. They pair off in a series of "you-said-he-said" arguments and each holds a sign as they name call: Fool, Wanna-be, Blow-hard, and Do-nothing. After wearing each other out with insults, they decide to call off the- experiment. An expanded version of Martin's poem "The Deodorants" provides more comic relief before, in a classic comic conclusion, husband and wife are back in each other's arms ("We have said each other's name ... We haven't done that in years. We have only spoken to each other as objects"), Nicholas and Nachelle have fallen in love, and the curtain comes down on a rousing reprise of "Once Upon a Time"-this time with a happy ending: "Once upon a time there were two couples, / But there's no once upon a time; / Now it's a new friend, and old love, a good friend, a true love / And it's now!" It Pays to Advertise is a contrapuntal opera. Plot and theme are built on contrasts. The television screen and real life change places freely. Characters pair off for arguments and resolutions. Action is advanced through a symmetry of dialogues and paired arias. The audience is invited to participate in the debates and to join the workaday world that these characters turn upside down. The opera demonstrates not only Martin's inventiveness as a librettist but the musical dimensions of his own poems over the years. His original contrapuntal poems written in the sixties had the flow of opera duets with their alternate of blending, synchronization, and conflict. Selections from The Shit-Storm Poems in performance were laced with spirituals to develop again and again the motif of "Been in the Storm So Long." ThePersistence ofFlesh presented poems that were "mad songs sung / By human birds." Like lovers at the curtain of an opera, "After many words / They go away together / To bruise the night / In each other's arms" (46). In Calileo 'sSuns, one of the questions constantly haunting the poet is "What of the Pain in the Songs You Sing?" (30). In a volume in progress Martin is listening again to the music in Southern Voices. On several occasions he has identified music as the most abiding influence on his poems and his performances: "I somehow mystically believe that poems are songs and should therefore have the quality of music to them.... I've stolen many a rhythm

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from composers, altered it, and put it in my verse. I think that music is the very essence of my poetry" (qtd. in Cochran, "Martin" 61). Martin's most recent projects as a librettist are moving in many different directions. Again with the music of Phillip Magnuson he has written "Magnificat," celebrating Jesus' mother Mary's rejoicing that she will"give birth / to a radiance never before beheld" (HWMP). Light and energy exclude from her being as she announces the coming of salvation for humanity: "Behold there is a sacred spirit residing in my flesh / for God has touched me with his miraculous hand and / I am fruitful with a new gift." He is also at work on a requiem mass, Voices: A Requiemin the Words ofSlaves. As in The Logof the Vigilante, Martin returns to letters, autobiographies, slave posters' and other historical documents in order to tell the slaves' stories and pay tribute to their endurance. In a letter to Joseph Fennimore, he notes that he has "suggested juxtaposing the regular Latin mass against the slave material to suggest a higher sense of irony and hypocrisy" (HWMP). He believes that kind of counterpoint can work, "but I will not know until Dolph [Adolphus Hailstork] settles in to looking at the text." He is also writing the libretto for a cantata about Crispus Attucks, with music by Hailstork. As a sign that one has arrived in a literary genre, an artist will often stand back and enjoy a little mockery of the conventions and rules hovering overhead. The process is akin to what John Fiske has called a parodic undermining wherein authors or composers might poke fun at various artistic forms and styles even as they use them. One more work in progress is Martin's TheI Hate Opera Guideto Operas in Your Own Language-purported to have been written by Archangelo Grabrielli Pootineni (1850-1999) and translated by Herbert Woodward Martin (HWMP). Old favorites include Giusseppi Bettlebini's "The Monkey That Drunk the Wine," Johannes Effiminsky's "The Skunk That Stunk," Dudley [apalima's "La Intestina," and everyone's favorite Toen Koeieica's "The Analist." If imitation is flattering and parody is considered high praise, Martin's tongue-in-cheek guide book is yet one more form of counterpoint as he pokes fun at his own excursions into the world of opera.

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· 10 ·

Remembrances and New Directions Galileo's Suns and A Matter of Honor

Thirty years after the publication of his first book of poems and two years after his retirement from full-time teaching, Martin's publications, performances, and awards continued to increase in range and number. Among the many projects he undertook was a new show, Langston and Company (the poetry of Langston Hughes and poets influenced by Hughes), which he created in 1999. Demand for the Dunbar show increased as well, and he was at work on two new operas, an oratorio, and several new volumes of poems. He continued to teach two courses a year as poet in residence at the University of Dayton. He was as well the city of Dayton's Paul Laurence Dunbar Poet Laureate. In 1998 the revised and greatly expanded version of The Logof the Vigilante won first prize in the Mellen Poetry Press contest for narrative poetry, and he took first prize as well in a poetry performance contest in London's West End. In the midst of all of this activity his poetry developed in two directions. In Galileo 's Suns and AMatter ofHonorhe turned increasingly to memory poems and commemorative tributes. In several works in progress as well-such as Southern Voices and Myths and Ritualshe came full circle by returning to biographical reminiscences going as far back as his boyhood in Birmingham, Alabama. Galileo's Suns was published along with Deborah Ellen Stokes's Epicurus' Dominion as companion volumes under the title Dunbar:Sunsand Dominions (Bottom Dog Press, 1999). In his introduction to the volume, editor David Shevin pays tribute to Dunbar and acknowledges Martin's reputation as a performer of his poems, noting that Martin demonstrates for young students how Dunbar's "Jump back, honey, jump back" makes him "the original rapper" (7). Shevin calls Martin's poems in this collection "reflective" as the poet ranges from "tributes to past masters to memoir to gentle self-reflections ... • 19°·

Martin and his wife, Sue, at retirement dinn er in Dayton,fune 1996. Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Martin.

from parables to celebrations to songs. " Through it all Martin provides what Shevin calls "wide-awake attention and a gift for surprise" (11). Galileo's Suns presents twenty poems with considerable variety of form , unified by determination to remember and celebrate events and voices from the pa st. "My Mother at the End of Her Days" is at once Martin's farewell to his mother who was dying of cancer and a further tribute to the voice he introduced early and nurtured throughout hi s career. This tightly compressed seventeen-line narrative is both the anchor poem of this collection and the poem that he performed in London. Both on the page and on the sta ge this work em powers voices used to being ignored or no longer able to speak for themselves . The stor y of "M y Mother at the End of Her Days" is swift and brutal. A banker for whom time is "golden and mighty" requires th e dying woman's signature "on the dotted line" for legal purposes (4 0). Though very near the "end of her days ," she still "could wri te her name" but could not see: "it was the line that caused trouble. " This scene of "im por tan t haste" will not wait for a signature that takes time, forcing her instead to "set down slavery's strong X." Those "two improper / strokes" cause the poet to weep that "so many communal ancestors" who "died trying / to learn how to write" could not be honored. Instead "an accomplished task" is taken from this vulnerable woman, and "all of her joys " are supplanted by "a longing in her heart." Remembrances and New Directions

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That longing pervades the poem as a cycle of denial is repeated through a succession of losses stretching back to slavery and ending in the finality of death itself. In October Martin was invited back to the West End to perform a full evening of his work. A few months before that, he had addressed a group of young poets participating in a contest in Dayton. After congratulating the winners, he noted that the difference between those who win now and those who return to win tomorrow is endurance, perseverance, and practice. Writers make choices, he added, to infuse the poem with reality, strike a chord of truth, and eliminate excess. He emphasized the poem coming to life through performance: "We do what we do over and over, we practice until sheer exhaustion comes because we love what words can do."! The reward, he suggests, is "love of words and the amazing magic that they can create." Pronouncing the word, playing games with words as he had been doing since childhood in Alabama, created a love for "what words can do unreservedly." That magic enabled him to stand vigil over the silenced voice of his mother, who was still able to write but could no longer see the all-important "dotted line." He gave the contestants in Dayton that evening a further glimpse into his goals. He also gave them a charge for their own work: "I write because I am charmed, because I am seduced by the sensuous sound of words, the feathery airiness of their rhythm, the tinge of their smell, the vibrations of their light and sweet warmth of their taste" (HWMP). Martin peoples Galileo's Suns with an assembly of heroes to whom he pays tribute. Most of the poems in the collection are memory pieces that return to voices he recalls from boyhood in Alabama, while growing to maturity on Glenwood Avenue in Toledo, or in celebration of each new year. Captured also are youthful excursions to Saturday newsreels with moving depictions of the Holocaust, pensive visits many decades later to what had been "the colored section of the theatre," and always the haunting memories of music from the spirituals to the dark and enthralling "sassy music." The volume also presents a series of tributes to fellow poets Len Roberts, Etheridge Knight, and Donald Hall. These memory poems and tributes acknowledge an indebtedness to many influences on his work, and at the same time, reach back to many voices from Martin's youth. A closer look at selections from Galileo's Suns affords insight into how Martin's themes and the music of his forms have matured three decades after his first book. Experimentation with poetic form, precision and economy of statement, and the crucial sounds of poems in performance shape the contours of the twenty poems in this collection. Beginning with "The New Year Accomplished," the speaker invokes Galilee's revisionary 192

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insights as he languishes in the Town Square hearing worshipers called by the town bell to "pollution stained shires" (15). Alone and isolated while the grass, the wind, the earth itself pray, the speaker takes action to nurture and create his work within the cycles and revolutions of nature. But he equivocates: "The sun turns or the earth turns" (15). He compares his small plot of earth before planting to "the rings of Saturn with dust and rock debris held together by some mysterious force." This New Year's celebration is not so much about observation or theory but action conveyed by motion and the speaker's own participation in the growth of a new day. "I by necessity will plow the land," he resolves, "so that growth can begin where, in this corn field, bounty of earth, sun and rain fulfills the soft travel of what hand, what simple struggle, can accomplish." What begins with languishing moves forward to struggle, and time itself-as measured by the coming of the new year-is not a simple event but an accomplishment to be memorialized. The celebratory poems of Galileo's Suns participate in what Martin has called the magic of invocation: "the act of naming helps us to access language and it helps us to remember the familiar and to store the painful" (in "Fire" 1). In "Memory Poem for the New Year," a young boy tells the story of W. D., Uncle Ad, Cousin Billy, and Nana, a fireworks accident, and a fortuitous surviving index finger that W. D. uses to "beckon women" and "bring any situation to a climax" (16). Of course he wants to follow along and listen to the men's "flamboyance and jive" and observe their seduction of a voluptuous neighbor woman. He wants to learn their "deft and clever maneuvers" and "the escapades of their secret ways." The strongest surviving memory is, however, the voice of Nana, who strikes fear into W. D., stops his honey tongue, and saves him in the process from walking into what the white men had planned for him. Nana kept them all together, he remembers: "She held everyone / who came into the house under the pressure / of her biblical thumb." The voice was strong and lingering: "There would never be scissors strong or sharp / enough to cut the threads of Nana's voice." Her plan for them included not only survival but positive directions for each New Year: "She had watched liquor and sex suck in / the men around her; I was not to be lost. / She would bring one of us to salvation / if she had any say" (17). This recurring collective voice of conscience and admonition does have her say once again-decisively and almost recklessly-in the concluding poem of this volume, "An Abundance of Words." In fact, she gets the last word in this volume by delivering a rambling but frighteningly lucid monologue on superstition. Martin selected this poem from a volume in progress (Abundances) to be the conclusion of Galileo's Suns. Mama's text is direct: Remembrances and New Directions

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"The ironing board is shaped like a coffin. Never take it out at night no matter what you do." Her explication of her text is lengthy and complex involving portents of being buried alive. In all, the goals must be kept in clear view: "She knew all the terrifying jargon, which made the small children keep their behavior in check." That was never enough, however, she added with deliberation: "But for the ones who are almost grown, you have to come close to murder to make them act right" (41). To the speaker's objection that a lot of those were "weird beliefs," some of which "eventually turned into religions," she responds with intricate details on how the ironing board can be used in the right place and at the right time to bathe and dress the newly dead body as it stiffens. She does not miss a detail ("Perhaps even some bones have to be broken so that they lay straight in their coffins"), underscores clearly the severity of the task ("You need several hefty people to move a dead body around"), and does not shy away from philosophical observation about why this whole process is so important: "Death is an illusion chile; nothing is there; we perpetuate what we want to see. We do this to make ourselves feel better and to believe that nobody will throw us away, or leave us like carrion to the dogs of the neighborhood and the foul crows of the air when it is our time" (41-42). Never missing a beat, Mama elaborates on how she herself wants to be buried. She wants to be "put away nicely," she declares, because no doubt night will claw at her like "some ravenous vulture that hasn't eaten for days." She wants to be fitted very snugly into hard white oak and down deeper than usual so she will have more time "to prepare to / greet the face of God." Sister Charity should sing at the funeral, and her voice should wrap around her "tighter than any ever could." Just keep the air out, and "that's all I want." Meanwhile she will sit back and enjoy with no ironing board going through her doors after sundown and not "a speck of dirt" swept "out of the door after the sun has gone down either." Mama then gets the last word on the coming and going of Galilee's suns after all: "Call me silly, foolish old woman, stupid, whatever your heart's a mind to say. It won't bother me none; my mind is made up" (42). Several other poems in this collection commemorate people, places, and incidents from a personal collective past. Death in a very different context is the subject of "Remembering Glenwood Avenue, Toledo, Ohio," the recollection of an out-of-body experience that the poet recalls from his boyhood when he "lay ill" in a second-floor room of the house located almost in the backyard of an art museum. Not quite like the collectibles across the street, the home survives now in memory only-replaced by a parking lot that dislodged their second floor into the "heightened air." In a moment of 194

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calm madness, the speaker watched as his soul slid out of his body to "hover awhile, investigating my room." The poet kept this to himself, of course, understanding that few would "believe or accept the mystery of what happened / Or why my spirit chose to slip gently back into my body's embrace" (18). In further commemoration of sacred and mysterious places in history, two poems in Galileo's Suns visit the upper regions of a theater where long ago benches were provided for the poet's African American ancestors. "The Colored Section of the Theatre" is a pilgrimage up the narrow wooden stairs to where the air is "thin and frayed," the light is muted and "rejection hangs musty." In that place one still feels the presence of those whose laughter is now stale and whose applause is inaudible. Only years of dust "seals the weathered cracks in the floor" as the words and gestures of actors far below still float up "to be tasted, smelled" (20). The somber and reverent tour continues in a companion piece ("Here") as the speaker still feels the rejection that hangs "like old humidity / Unable to evaporate." In spite of all the dust and through the distance, the poet nonetheless hears the "ancient horrors" and the "sacred rattle" and is wary that the lingering rejection will not yet vanish: "Here old neglect / Lies covered under a thin membrane of dust / waiting for the clean chance to infect again" (21). That recurring infection is the subject of "The Spoils of the Day," a poem that records even older memories of a ten-year-old boy who, when "wealthy enough to sustain a / bus ride," would go to the "weekend picture show" (22). He remembers going for "the stage show, two full-length features, a serial / popcorn, and sometimes candy." But most of all it was the heroic cowboys like Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autry who were "chasing the bad guys, like / useless herds, over cliffs or into the Pacific so that the / good people of the world might have seven days of contemplation" (22). As a "bonus for being good" and "when the house / was prosperous," the boy was allowed to stay a little later to take in the "Movietown News"-newsreels of "real life" that made him "shudder tears ... especially when they excavated the / bodies of dead Jews." Too young to understand, he confronted a "sweet horror" where no hero would emerge to save the victims and set the world right. Growing in his imagination on the way home, the horror of what he witnessed was planted for years to come: "No / white ten gallon hat Autry, Cassidy, or Rogers" came back in to "listen to our black cheers of liberation." Those hard lessons are still stored in memory and celebrated reluctantly: "I am not happy with my licensed information about serial outcomes. I would be happier if someone else had seen the spoils of this day." Of course the richest repository of memories in Martin's work has been music. Whether it was singing Bach at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Remembrances and New Directions

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Martin on a Sunday in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1943. Courtesy of th e estate of Willie Ma e Martin.

New York City in the 1960s or weaving the spirituals into his Paul Laurence Dunbar one-man show, musical forms have been central to Martin 's pronouncement of the word in the writing and performing of his poems. "W hat of the Pain in the Songs You Sing?" addresses several recurring questions. "Why do you sing the song of the spirituals?" a West African woman asks the poet after one of his performances: "Aren' t the spirituals a reminder of the horrors your ancestors suffered?" And she does not stop there: "Weren' t they a serious reminder of watermelon food , / of the terrible sadness of a bygone time" that you "w ould not want to recall?" Yes, surely, to all that the poet responds, and his explanation of why he includes the songs none196

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theless pays tribute to the people and experiences from which they emerged. They are not "party songs" he reminds her, they are "power first and freedom second." They spring forth from the wind and nature: "I sing them out of / respect for the enduring lives laid down in lashes." Remembering and celebrating the songs, the people, and the experiences will inspire new lives and remind "those crawling into the new world / that they are vital and not aliases / which move around in the dark" (30). Many fascinating issues arise in question-and-answer sessions following Martin's performances of Dunbar's and his own poems. This exchange about the powerful songs moved front and center into Galileo's Suns and into his reflections on performance itself. It is not easy or pleasant to sing those songs, he answers-or to relive the suffering. "Sometimes these very songs catch in my throat / like a bleeding splinter," he admits. At the same time, however, it is the reenactment of "the beauty of such thorns" that makes it "possible for me to live / less burdened by what men may say." In keeping these songs alive for new audiences, he puts up a stone of endurance against the wind: "So I celebrate my mother and all the women before her, / and my father and all the men before him, / because something of their blood is contained in my blood." None of that can happen without remembering and commemorating by pronouncing the word. To those who persist in asking "then why sing them?" the poet and his songs respond: "So I won't forget; / Memory is our history" (31). Martin's poetry is consistently rich in the use of music to commemorate history and celebrate shared values. One additional way he underscores the crucial function of music is through humor, irreverence, and parody. In "Sassy Music," for example, he mocks the sham of pseudoreligion through a series of ironic tributes to traditional liturgical structures. Creating what John Fiske calls "parodic undermining" (Reading the Popular 104), Martin uses the language, symbols, and conventions of dominant religious ideologies and practices to mock and subvert what he feels are abuses. The poem is grandscale spectacle, a Bakhtinian carnival of mockery, sarcasm, and epic pronouncement. "The tree is alive with a sassy music," the overture intones, with echoes of the Von Trapp family as the crickets in the grass "maintain a rough continuo" that echoes the Catholic funeral mass and the "Dies irae, Dies ira." Here, however, the "premonition" of this mass presents not the love and sacrifice of a redeemer but a cast of questionable characters ranging from "a hedonist Eve," priests, mullahs, and rabbis who offer grace and redemption "as high as a raging falsetto / of Southern black white / Protestant preachers who / know without question that / the overreaching unifier / is the suffering Christ" (24). Remembrances and New Directions

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The music of this feast is "sassy" in two ways. The charade being mocked is itself sacrilegious; at the same time, the narrator is mounting back talk on the attack: "then they turn to the / offertory which is / the Pentecost of / every religious house / of love in the making" (24). The part of the mass where the congregation offers itself with the sacrificial lamb is here reduced to mere monetary offerings, and the mystic presence of the dove's Pentecostal descent is preempted by marketplace transactions bordering on pickpocketing: "Each practitioner / is asked to join / in the kindness of / delicious and enthralling / giving, a kind of somnolence of being / where you end up / giving away the self / before the final amen" (24). The effect of this ceremony is to deaden what began alive with music. Questioning is not encouraged, Pentecostal zeal is numbed, and what should be a life-giving community of remembering chooses sleepwalking instead. What energy there is leads to rupture, the strength is cowardly: "Charity, repent, / pusillanimous strength / are the musts / to instigate rapture / which led to the / inevitable carnage of Carthage." Even the music itself lacks depth as the "voices of heaven" in their "celestial song" are "all a facade filled with dark passion / a tradition the community hailed with petty relationships of dear heart peace thoroughly / grazed with sunshine quiet and friendship family." Through irony and parody, "Sassy Music" addresses a central issue invoked by the title of the volume. Galilee's persecution and imprisonment parallel the abuses, which this sassy singer uncovers. "Money is a fine precipice from which to jump," he reassures us. "Each believer is called to deliver faith insatiable" (25). For Martin, 1999 was a wondrously productive year of prolific composition, continual expansion into new directions in his poems, and the considerable recognition of prizes and awards. In a letter of January 13 he confided, "I am trying to work as fast as I can these days absorbing as much of the inspiration as I can" (letter to the author, HWMP). While he had retired from full-time teaching the year before, he continued to teach two classes per year, perform his Paul Laurence Dunbar show all over the country ("The reading season has only five more months left. Then it's next year again"), and publish new poems with great success: three of his Rwanda poems and "Wilderness" in the same issue of Papyrus ("a record for me"). He and his wife and family were moving to a new house, and that involved not only the usual complexities but the further sorting of new materials to be included in the Herbert W. Martin Papers at the University of Toledo. A recurring theme of the outpouring of new poems in this year is Martin's return to the people and events of his first twelve years growing up in Birmingham and Toledo. Three volumes emerging in large measure from mem198

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ories of that earliest time of his life are the chapbook published six months later (A Matter ofHonor) and two projects still evolving both in manuscript and performances: Myths and Rituals and Southern Voices. A Matter of Honor greets the new millennium with hope for the future and the deepening knowledge that comes from revisiting, speaking forth, and examining memories. Dedicated to his daughter, Julia Johanna Martin, these nine poems once again empower a variety of voices and celebrate history, relationships, and the promise of the future. In "My Mother Spoke" the poet hears his name pronounced three times"clearly, a summoning" (no page numbering used in the chapbook). Who was there, he wonders, issuing forth "clearly, a reckoning?" The house is empty, but the floors, walls, and windows watch and listen. The light identifies him as he walks through the rooms finding doors that are "partial / openings looking for a voice / I cannot find." That voice is heard forcefully again in "A Matter of Honor." The poem that gives this volume its title is a retelling of the story from "My Mother at the End of Her Days." This version is much more matter-of-fact, sounding like a reporter relating the details following a stroke: "Power of attorney quickly disappeared when / she could no longer sign on the dotted line." When the banker asks her to "X the line," thereby overturning the empowerment earned through a collective history of struggle, she tells him, sternly, that she knows how to write and remembers well who she is: "Writing her name was a matter of history. / Spelling her single name would honor those / the law forbade learning and died trying." She too would assert this matter of honor and, if necessary, die trying: "So when tangible death appeared she thrust / out her left hand, willingly fell asleep / Having struggled peacefully with pencil / And paper all her long and generous life." A trio of poems in the chapbook speaks further of the speaker's experiences growing up and recalls painful scenes and much that went unsaid. "My Mother Never Made Scenes" recalls the muffled sounds of anger when the poet's father cheated on his mother. The quiet conflict is portrayed through striking contrasts: evenings laughing over checkers, the retreats to the bedroom where one could feel only "what the floors tolerated," the father's visits to "that other woman in our city," and his relentless games of solitaire where he and loneliness battled-each playing with"devious sleight of hand." Something "in his blood" would not allow him to surrender or reveal answers to the speaker's questions: "What did that woman know about him / that she would not reveal to my mother? / Why did the two women never speak formally?" Of course the two women may have spoken, and the speaker alludes to much that he could not observe from the Remembrances and New Directions

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distance carefully maintained. Perhaps the wife never did make scenes, but so much that went unsaid and "the mystery in his heart" are remembered here again as crucial elements of the pain in the songs that must be sung. One additional poem suggests what could have been said and what might have been lived over a lifetime of "Absence." Why so long ago did truth fail and the tongue "fear to utter" what the heart feels?-the poet begins. "Hesitation is a silent poison" and rejection "a fist against the heart" as the poet wonders why he chose "in December so long ago" silence rather than honesty. This poem suggests a romance not pursued, a sexual encounter not initiated, a defense not made, and much more that went unsaid throughout the lingering absence felt since long ago. All the ambivalence suggested in this poem comes back to the speaker's need "after all these years / when it can no longer matter to you" to still "record the truth / Grooved deeply in wax, a grave vision of words in a / medley of rows, waiting for a dark silver pin to rake / the sweet emptiness which has been curled away." Whether those wax imprints are apologies for an unfulfilled romance, the longawaited inscriptions for an absent father's gravestone, or yet another answer to the recurring questions about why he sings these painful songs, the ambivalence in "Absence" keeps alive the many possibilities for the truths that memory might always yet speak further; "I have wounded all the harmonies which might have cheered / You," the poet begins to conclude, to which he adds the memory and imagination's quest to repair the ruins. Ironically there is the hope that this attempt to overcome hesitation and rejection-though long overdue-might yet allow "you to hear the special / mysteries hidden in my voice which were only for you." This note of optimism is elaborated more fully in the deceptively simple poem "Fireplace." Set again in the "sweet winter cold," the narrator closes the fireplace flue while his daughter practices Debussy on the piano. But the closed flue cannot seal in the heat totally, and some warmth that seeps up through the brick warms a starling who has nestled at the top of the chimney. The bird is so cozy and forgetful that in one of his frequent naps he plummets "headlong down / toward the palm of the grate." The tumble produces, of course, an unwelcome awakening and the bird flies with terror to and against the rhythm of the Debussy. The poem ends with father and daughter debating about whether "something is in there" and wondering if it is the wind weeping or an "audible sin" that is "stirring the dust of old fires." A Matter of Honor added several new pieces to Martin's efforts to reconstruct and preserve earlier experiences and to celebrate what might otherwise be overlooked or repressed. These memory poems were also another way also to empower voices that had long ago learned to internalize their 200

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own silences. For over four years he had been at work on a series of poems exploring the tragedies in Rwanda-extending back a decade to civil war, genocide, and a series of upheavals leading to the death or displacement of millions. "Rwanda NO.1" appeared in 1998,and in 2002 the entire sequence "Ten Pieces for Rwanda" was published in AfricanAmerican Review. Coming three decades after "A Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary" and following upon The Logof the Vigilante, the Rwanda poems revisit the atrocities of oppression and second-guess the optimistic projections for Africa which close TheLog. "Rwanda NO.1" returns to images very like those burned into Martin's Vietnam soldier, now projected across a continent and a quarter-century: "This woman's body is blistered with death," the observer begins, "Soon her swollen arms will break her bonds.... Her head lies five feet away from her body / Screaming silence. The dust of revolution / Chokes her mouth" (571). The opening images of flight in a futile attempt to escape the machete are repeated throughout the sequence dominated by severed heads, bulldozed bodies, poison seeping from open boils, and the acrid stench of death and rotting flesh. The poems do not point blame so much as settle into a sickening resignation to senseless killing and an inescapable entrapment at least in part of our own making. Here there is "no north which will lead me to safety" and "no generous way to arrive at success" (no. 2, 571). Memories persist of "a time / that was greenly sad and unfair," but even the sorrow songs can no longer "document their offense" or offer the escape of camouflage: "Who among us / Can sing of joy with our feet bound, / Our hands tied behind our backs?" (no. 4, 572). The self-inflicted devastation is everywhere. The trees and flowers are gone as "John Deere shovels bite the ground" and perversely plant side by side "large stacks of bodies" all the while unable to overcome the realization that, in this place, "No one can repair the air" (no. 6, 572). New solutions are proposed and "A new balm is prescribed" for all the pain-and yet "With easy malice one African severs another man's head," and "the ground sprouts bodies like rotting potatoes" (no. 6, no. 7, 572-73). Everywhere betrayal destroys the celebratory tone of the optimistic close of The Log: "And he, who I thought was my neighbor, came with swift / and easy hate in his hands, cleft my head from my soul, as I / knelt in the dust of our homeland" (no. 8, 573). In the midst of all the sores that will not heal, poison so pervasive it becomes "the texture of the wind" and cranes that come to eat away at the natural ground, there remains only a hint of hopeful renewal. As the old earth is pushed aside, the large mounds appear "as if some gigantic ant / Had burrowed up toward light" (no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, 573-74). In the end the poems cannot break away from their opening images of machetes, shovels and bulldozing humanity, Remembrances and New Directions

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and the choking dust of bloody revolutions. But even then, some small hints of hope emerge. Builders' plans for "new tenants," are cheered by a "single / stalk of corn [that] begins to grow here." At least there is the possibility of rebirth as "the rain washes the earth the silt flows away, / Someone will make passage here / Take flights like breaths / Of human nature" (no. 10, 574). Ironically, then, this more recent kind of commemorating of ancient atrocities ends with softened but enduring hope for a future. At the end of a decade of exploring history through the composition of memory poems and the performance of commemorations, Martin was at work as well on a volume of poems paying tribute to the voices he recalls growing up in Alabama in the 1930S and early 1940s. Southern Voices captures the sounds and scenes he found flooding into his memories of playground games, teachers and role models, and tenant farmers nudged back into the poet's lens by Walker Evans. One of the poems, "In the Evening," Martin moved into TheLogofthe Vigilante-the one where"an old woman rocks on her porch screened against the flies," grateful now that "the Good Lord has been kind / To let me pass these few days in peace" (Log, 52). Martin also includes in this collection "My Mother's Voice," a poem he had published earlier and one that captures not only the spirit of the short narratives of The Log but also the confidence and irony of TheShit-Storm Poems written nearly three decades earlier. In the process, Southern Voices presents vivid scenes of childhood and oblique visions beyond the conventional memoir. "Playing Until Forgetfulness Comes" recounts a boyhood story of playtime with friends, the mysterious disappearance of money set aside to pay the insurance man, and a mother's subsequent exuberant rage and embarrassment. "Remember all the things I have said, then mama went to work," the poem opens." In a crisp opening four lines Martin creates a range of experiences and emotions: "Summer Mondays are / timeless in the hands of boys. The older family men harbored nothing but tedium and black / failure moving in their veins. Who in society had ever permitted them to feel one eventful/day?" On the first Monday of every month the sick and accident insurance had to be paid. Mama worked many hours to "stay a step ahead of that old insurance man," and the boys knew that she always left it "hung in its envelope / behind the photograph of Jesus." Forgetfulness came early to the boys that Monday-even before the insurance man came by-and even decades later the poet still is astonished "how that money could have / disappeared from behind the family savior." In one of those "slights / of hand that no one can perceive," on that day the money was gone before the insurance man could collect, and the mother "screamed so loud a chill went through the bones of that house." She asks them if some202

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body was in that house, when no kids are to play in that house while she is at work and do they understand that at last she had gotten ahead of that insurance man's demands and now they let "some sorry-assed kid in the house who steals me blind. Go on, get out of my sight before I beat you both to death." But when Mama stops crying and calms down, a neighbor lady comes by to report that the men had been drinking and she saw them steal the money. No need to punish the kids at all. "Well I tell you we could have used mama for the insurance money," the boy recalls, "She was sorry as sorry could be all over the place." At first they could not calm her down at all or "release her prayerful sorrow." But on that most memorable day, what wins out in the end is still play and love. On that day, "one of those troubled Mondays" when "Uncle Ad reached behind Salvation and removed the protective policy," neither sickness and accident nor anger and shame would triumph. Through it all, the boys knew that other kinds of forgetfulness would also triumph: "Still we knew that with time / she would regain her innocent and unlimited supply of forgiveness and love." "Playing Until Forgetfulness Comes," is a good story-vivid with detail on the page, and musically resonant and authentic in performance. The headlong rush of the unbroken paragraph, the multiple perspectives, the way the boy-narrator takes us inside mama, the men, the neighbor woman, and their own fears and reaffirmation makes the thirty-three lines an accomplished display of counterpointed empowerment. "A Childhood Memory" is quieter yet more oblique in its images of creativity, innocence, and wonder. "I found the world in the small stones / In the back alleys of Birmingham, Alabama / among the papers, bottles and cans which / were thrown or blown under the houses where we used to play." Hide and seek with the girls is featured in those long-ago alley games, and the older boys concluded that "we younger boys had yet to learn / Of the explosive sweetness of our desires." It was a time of a multitude of lessons-most of which take years to reach understanding. "Dark Pronouncements" recalls the "preacherly black" Old Miss Molten who "could curse her students / with her left-eye, while her right eye proceeded with the business / of roll calling." The poet recalls in later years Miss Molten's warning that he would never amount to anything without Maurice, with whom he loses touch because they both move on ("No forwarding address") and they are left with only memory. An ever darker pronouncement is provided by the poet's mother, who was "never at a loss for astonishing metaphor." She is often more than blunt: "You will, for all / intents and purposes, / end up shitting and stepping in it / You will need an expert recipe for cleaning the scent from your shoes." Memories of Maurice and warnings about the Remembrances and New Directions

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recipe alternately visit and elude the mature man and become a part of his life as those two voices of warning merge. "I step with caution," he resolves, gliding his feet along "true and necessary / longitudes." Boyhood curses cannot be reasoned with ultimately: "I try to stand clear of the gray / prophesies of old women, and practice friendships within close / proximity of what the human hands can accomplish." Like the memoirs and commemorative poems of SouthernVoices, another memory poem "Epistle to an Old Time" finds Martin coming full circle in his tributes to the influences of his earliest years. In the form of a letter addressed to his cousin Louise the poem is a eulogy to her as well as a recollection of difficult but treasured times that slipped away and yet somehow remain preserved in words and images and song. The speaker begins suggesting he is "too old to remember perfectly," people that are "too far into death" for him even to trust his memories. Yet with the years "slipping away from us like the shuffle / of rock, sand, and debris in water" the task becomes all the more urgent to "speak of lost family communion," to tell stories of meals shared and tedious worry that settled in "those three rooms / which framed our coming and going." Ironically this speaker who chides his own fading memory creates glowingly clear portraits of their Uncle Ad's death (who"simply stopped one day"-so amazingly that they wrote a story about him in the newspaper and "put his full name Addison Minnifield.") All is gone and it is too late, the poet tells cousin Louise, to resume the endless rituals of cleaning and rinsing that so occupied their days of"dirty dishes and floors / and so many soiled clothes needing to be patched and scrubbed." Again the task is to save and preserve the leftovers from the meals, the shared memories of their lives together, and the desire to make sense through the power of words: "Dust has settled on those / Sundays when we were dressed in our saved best. When we came from / Sermon and hymn, our first duty was to take off those Sunday clothes / And preserve them on hangers." Whether folded on hangers, packed into Styrofoam doggie-bag boxes or composed into poems, Martin's most recent poems restore and preserve a personal and communal past where meaning is recovered. In TheLogof the Vigilante, Galileo's Suns, and A Matter ofHonor-as well as in several works in progress-Martin is heading in new directions by going back to his most distant past. Many of the poems in Southern Voices are dialogues where several characters interact. Even in the monologues such as "My Mother's Voice" or "A Childhood Memory," the presence of"other" makes the speeches into what Mikhail Bakhtin calls double-voiced or multivocal. The mother's voice speaks to and through and debates an auditor son to whom she delivers a 204

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Martin autographing a book for cousins Lynncheryl (left) and Mary Ann (right), February 2 0 02 , in Dayton. Courtesy of Herbert Woodward Martin.

diatribe that becomes parodic proclamations ("Lawd, Lawd, these children are going to be the / death of us all, / not that we ain 't given them plenty of kindling wood"). An ironic response to the older boys' mocking of younger boys becomes the real lesson learned in the back alleys. The multiple perspectives of the boys, the neighbor lady, and mama before and after her profuse repentance create the multiple layers of irony in "Playing Until Forgetfulness Comes. " "Dark Pronouncements" is structured as an overlappin g dialogue between the teacher and the mother whose voices merge and with whom the po et struggles. The old wom an on the porch in "In the Evening" constructs-as doe s the record keeping in TheLogofthe Vigilantean elaborate montage that blends multiple voices into a construction of history stretching back to the spirituals. In the monologue "Walker Evan s' Alabama Tenant Farme r 1936 " the overwhelming presence of "other " is the speaker 's daughter, his "last gam ble" who might yet be his wa y out of th e hills. "There was once hope in my eyes , / as fresh as my newborn 's cries," he begins. But amidst the hope that "she will break free," he still seem s trapped: "A stone is in me which is blind / To that which I once called hope." As so often occurs in Martin 's poems, the generations are brought together and the dialogue keeps hope alive . The multivocal insights reached Remembrances and New Directions

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in these dialogues revisit the counterpoint artistry of Martin's earliest contrapuntal poems and develop alongside the polyphonic dialogues in his more recent operas and public performances. In his abiding interest in creating multiple voices, Martin has used language in a variety of ways to underscore and move beyond the limitations of language itself. His contrapuntal poems juxtaposed opposite perspectives and multiple meanings looking for a synthesis that only collisions can bring about. Like Dunbar, Martin combined standard poetic forms and the legacy of the African American oral tradition. He often positioned the sonnet or the sestina in counterpoint with spirituals or work songs. As in Dunbar's work, he also masked deeper ironies in humor, improvisation, and parody. From his acting techniques to his creation of opera librettos, Martin set Richard II's sonorous tones alongside musical comedy and postmodern drama; his opera plots and songs lifted the veil from Dunbar's minstrel-like humor and explored the quarrels of a married couple debating about the relative merits of their professions. Through it all, Martin created a deliberate dissonance in his language, a complexity of harmonious silences with debts to the slave songs, Imagist poems, and the Theater of the Absurd. In a letter to a German with whom he corresponded following his travels in 1936, Samuel Beckett has given us some of his most penetrating insights on how artists use language to first mask and then unveil what he calls "unfathomable abysses of silence" beneath the surface of the "terrible materiality of the word."3 Rejecting his acquaintance's request to translate some poems from their original German, Beckett uses the occasion to express some of his deepest beliefs about how language itself is "like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it" (171). Because language is a mask, we must, Beckett continues, "bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it-be it something or nothingbegins to seep through." Martin's variety of counterpoint techniques answer the challenge Beckett issues that literature not "remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting." Martin learned from Bach's countrapuntal forms, from the call-response pattern of the slave songs, and from the juxtaposition of sorrow and exuberance in the spirituals. In Dunbar's ironic songs, Martin found what Beckett called a dissolving of the "terrible materiality of the word surface"-much like the tearing apart through pauses in Beethoven's symphonies or in the "giddy heights" achieved in "unfathomable abysses of silence." Martin's poetry created through counterpoint what Beckett called a dissonance between words and their use that might finally make it "possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that 206

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underlies All." The back-and-forthness of Martin's counterpoint artistry reflects his search for a similar use of language: one rich in multiple meanings and polyphonic tones achieving something very like Beckett's "literature of the unword" that is "an assault against words in the name of beauty." Such is the forceful silence found in Martin's poems, the masks he wears in performance, the parodic humor of his operas, the ironic undertones he highlights in Dunbar. Martin works within a tradition fully aware of the music behind Dubois's veil and Dunbar's mask. At the same time he also tears apart and bores holes to reach the dissonance where we experience our humanity.

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Conclusion

In 1996 Martin retired from his full-time faculty appointment at the University of Dayton. Subsequently, he published dozens of new poems and three new books. He continues to teach at least two classes a year. He is still Poet-in-Residence at the University of Dayton and Paul Laurence Dunbar Poet Laureate of Dayton, Ohio. He performs his one-man show at least fifty times a year. This hectic pace raises a few questions. Does "retired" mean that one puts new tires on a well-traveled or seasoned vehicle? Does it mean to get tired again? Or are we seeing"retro"-ire? A reigniting of earlier"ire"again in a quietly forceful way? In April 1995, upon returning from his keynote presentation at the National College English Association meeting in Cleveland, Martin wrote: "I did my Dunbar presentation. Slowly but surely my name and the program are getting around. It has taken several light years, but wouldn't you know that when I am ready to retire it all falls in place?" (letter to author, April 2, 1995). Prior to this overly modest assessment about light-years, much had been falling into place for some time: degrees, professorships, poems, plays, performances, operas, books, and scholarly finds. In that same letter anticipating retirement, he gave some indications of what was to come: "I am at work on my second opera, and word has somehow gotten to the Virginia Opera who has asked me to do a libretto.... It looks like the kind of thing I could do .... I am also working on reworking the Dunbar book.... In the meantime I am trying to write poems and get them in the mail and keep them out there." Throughout his career, this had been Martin's pattern, of course. He kept a lot "out there" at all times. He worked on many projects at once, often counterpointing them against each other-and over the years a great deal did fall into place.

• 208.

Martin's writing and performances developed over four decades along the boundaries of areas many find to be irreconcilable. Throughout his career he mastered conventional written genres even as his performances celebrated and renewed elements of the oral tradition. His development over four decades as a writer and performer is the result of his cross-pollenization of a variety of art forms and genres. His talents have grown not incrementally-perhaps not even chronologically-but like a collage of counterpointed modes of expression complementing each other. His method has been to juxtapose oppositions, to blend contraries, to seek a kinesthetic perspective, to search for the creative hybrid. From childhood to the present, Martin's predisposition has been to try everything. His way of working is to see an object, a person, a painting from multiple perspectives; he hears the music of sharp contrasts and harmonies. His vision is a kinesthetic merging of structures on a page and humming in the night. His artistry reads one medium through another-alternately and through contrapuntal interactions. He is a performer first and foremost. His poems are scripts awaiting staging. Imagist, lyrical, political, conventional, and innovative-the poetry progresses on its own through voices and genres and hybrids of plays and operas, teaching and scholarship. He listened to Bach to write poems. He found his dramatic voice in the spirituals. He found color and structure in museums. He wrote plays and learned dramatic roles to empower voices and reclaim history. He was a chronicler of his own development. As a scholar, he understood the influence shaping the literature of his times. Accordingly he celebrated the achievements of others from Dunbar to Dickinson, from Pound to Hopkins to Phillis Wheatley. He sought the connections between various art forms and moved freely along the borders of highbrow texts and popular art. This kind of motivation and this way of working also provide insights about his achievements so far and clues about where his work seems to be going next. In 1996 he wrote that he was "driven by an overwhelming desire to make something of this life: to have written down a line someone somewhere might think is worth repeating; to have invented a form that future poets might find invigorating and challenging; to have written a line that becomes a model, a motto for someone's life. I suspect that will be immortality enough." He also expressed the desire to "write well and be included in the canon somewhere" (letter to John [not identified], June 23, 1996, HWMP). In that same letter he refers to being"driven," that it is "something in my blood that tells me I can do this, and that I can do it with the best of them.... I simply can not help this pursuit and ... it must be played

Conclusion

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out until I take my last breath." He feels that being a writer is a very "religious calling," that he is in "the business of condensed emotion, the preservation of humanity and all that is good about it" ("Fire" 15). Being driven means, for Martin, revising a great deal. The "fluidity and changeability of words" requires "making accurate and even sometimes severe choices between the words I write down" ("Fire" 18). The severity of the process means at times that he cannot "leave well enough alone" and he makes changes. He jokes: "More to the truth, I was vaccinated with a revising needle" (letter to the author, October 29, 1996). As a performer, Martin has been able to bring together his skills as a musician, his sense of drama, and the writer's creative energies. On stage he has widened significantly the audiences for poetry, theater, and music. His books display as well counterpointed skills not often combined: quiet lyrics and angry political statements, crisp and clear imagery, and expansive historical research. His published works have given voice to those seldom heard: newly freed slaves, victims of AIDS, ordinary workaday folks, blacks coming of age during the Depression in the South, sophisticated but lonely city dwellers, and wise old women rocking on the porch. He has been the voice of the spirituals who acts in Shakespeare and transposes Bach to poetic dialogue. He has kept anger behind his teeth while writing absurdist-drama humor; he has enacted sacred ritual and jived with the coffeehouse set. He has used his podium to address issues too little explored and made devoted followers of people who might not ordinarily attend a poetry reading. He has tiptoed along the borders of opera and rap, slugged it out with the scholars in library stalls, hosted national conferences of people not accustomed to working together for long if at all, and taught his readers to give themselves permission to mix forms, sounds, movements, and colors as they decorated their minds. His work invariably and unmistakably entertains and moves audiences to laugh and cry, to feel pain and then to rebound in an effort to make sense out of felt experience. Accolades continue in recognition of Martin's achievements. On March 13, 2002, the Ohio Arts Council honored him with the Ohio Governor's Award in the category of Individual Artist. The program notes for the award ceremony emphasized his unique gift for inspiring "people of all ages to revisit the writings of Dunbar" and how his "longstanding devotion to the arts ... has instilled a new appreciation of poetry" in his audiences. "He is a generous mentor to young poets," the Arts Council concludes, and he is "dedicated to bringing the arts into places where people live and workschools, concert halls, and town meetings" (6). In the spring of 2002 also, the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature bestowed on Martin 210

Conclusion

their annual Mark Twain Award for contributions to Midwestern Literature. Previous recipients have included Gwendolyn Brooks, Jack Conroy, Wright Morris, Jim Harrison, Ray Bradbury, Virginia Hamilton, Dudley Randall, Toni Morrison, among others. On May 5, 2002, Martin was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by the University of Dayton. At the ceremony, Paul Morman, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, noted that Martin not only inspired his students but also "showed them how the mind and heart connect" ("UD Commencement" 1B). At the same time, Martin is moving into a more domestic phase (paralleling his life in the early 1980s) where he plans to devote time to his newest granddaughter, Athena Rose. "That's my crazy life," Martin told interviewer Don Thrasher about the hectic pace of events in March 2002: "Somebody said, 'Herbert, you've got to slow down.' And I said, 'Well, when you pray for these things, you never know when you're going to get it' ... Anyway, I just go ahead and do it" (12). Martin's creative output is growing. He is still juxtaposing in counterpointed harmony a variety of genres and working in several media. His Dunbar show is in great demand, and he has added another one-man show "Langston and Company"-on Langston Hughes and his legacy. He teaches a variety of courses and acts in plays regularly. In 2001 and 2002, he delivered a series of lectures on "Topics for Writing Poetry" in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Orlando for the International Society of Poets. He is working on several musical compositions including operas and a funeral mass for American slaves. Numerous collections of poems are in progress: memories of growing up in the South (Southern Voices and Chasing the Wind); autobiographical works (W Poems and Final W); a few special collections including Women's Work ("women teaching us about important things: work and death, love and birth"), MagnetPoems (wordplay poems reminiscent of the Les Deux Megots' poetry machine or refrigerator magnet poems), and On the FlyLeaf (poems written on the fly leafs of other people's books); a novel in progress (HerrFritz Von NassFecker Writeswith Abandon); and plans for a possible Collected Works with various titles possible (PrivatePoems, Public Portraits; Early Songs, Midnight Music; and The Bones of the Bargain). At the same time, he continues to search and research Dunbar's lost manuscripts, and he tours with the Chautauqua program for the Ohio Arts Council. Over the past two years Martin has begun to perform Dunbar and his own poems accompanied by the jazz saxophone of University of Dayton musician Willie Morris. He is also working on a collection of photographs of the Dayton native Jane Reece. Accordingly, the range of his interdisciplinary projects continues to expand. Conclusion

211

In the early seventies Martin wrote a poem that begins, "Poor old Martin, he went mad you know." With characteristic self-deprecating whimsy, he has always managed to avoid taking himself too seriously. Any assessment of his achievements so far ought to account for that refreshing ability to laugh at himself even while he remains totally focused and dedicated to his beliefs. In a recent outpouring of somewhat whimsical efforts, he has included some soul-searching works and some end-of-the-journey outcries such as "To Bedlam and Back." A Whitmanesque catalog of wishes and decrees and incantations, the poem first serves up a list of those who must be taken to bedlam and then describes the conditions under which he is ready to go himself. "Take the man without any shoes to bedlam / Take the woman who is ironing her dues to bedlam," he begins-and then the outlandish and ironic litany includes the child who has yet to speak and "all my distant relatives over the mountain" as well as "all the people rising from nightly sleep to brush each other's / teeth with pastel toothpaste." Those who "adhere to no canon" as well as those "who have abandoned vanity" and "the ladies who espouse peace instead of ethnic love / to bedlam, to bedlam, to bedlam with them all." The speaker then delivers to "all those who are still listening" a kind of "final pronouncement"-a critical last will and testament-outlining thirty-six conditions under which he will allow himself to be taken off to bedlam. The list is long, outlandish, serious, diverse-including when we no longer love laughter, when there are no more "governmental liars, " when there are no more countries to waste and "muck," when "engineers of plastic" and "magicians who understand fog" have vanished. The poet claims he will gladly "welcome bedlam" when the "names on all the headstones have been erased," when "the last McDonalds has been sold and counted," when "Caballe has had the final opportunity to sing," and "when the last racist turns into beneficent moonlight." At that point at last the quest can end and "I shall have arrived." Healthy doses of the whimsical and the parodic have been part of the ingredients of Martin's counterpoint artistry throughout his career. The contrapuntal poems as early as New York the NineMillion and OtherPoems (1969) were built on playfulness and an undermining of the conventional single voice lyric. Even the serious social protest of The Shit-Storm Poems (1972) was broken by the humor of Deadwood Dick and the mock epic tones of "The Exorcism." The "Obituary" to James Americanus Crow lightens the pain in The Logof the Vigilante (2000) even as "Sassy Music" and "An Abundance of Words provided gentle parodic undermining in Galileo's Suns (1999). In performing Dunbar, Martin includes the humor of "The Party," and his ventures into the world of opera featured the mock heroics of It Pays toAdvertise. 212

Conclusion

Two poems in a recent work in progress (The Portsmouth, Ohio Poems, HWMP) suggest the ways in which he continues to use parody to poke fun at what he does not want taken too seriously. In "Some Philosophical Answers to the Question: Why Did the Pig Cross the Road?" he creates a sendup of everything from politics and the media to postmodern critical theory. Again he uses the catalog crafted into counterpoint patterns. The pig operates from many motives. He crossed the road in pursuit of "the greater good." He wanted to experience "the confluence of a cultural gestalt." He was in the grips of "contending discourses" or following the "sow principle" or maybe just "could not stop for death." Maybe, the poem suggests, the pig "had seen the Rodney King video" or he was going "to pick up an honorary degree." Then maybe he just thought "it was the right thing to do" or "National security was at stake" or he wanted to "suck all the marrow out of the other side." Then again there are some nonanswers: "I don't recall" or "What road?" In the end, perhaps it was all too obvious: the pig "wanted to lay low until the pork festival was over" and anyway "it truly did not know it was a pig." Even poetry itself gets roasted a bit in the parodic "Harper's Index Form Without the Numbers," a poem written in the form of the small-print side effects warnings in a television ad for nonprescription drugs. Poetry "is not for everyone / Nor should it be prescribed for the faint hearted," the warnings begin. Among the large contingent of those warned to keep their distance are those who "lack inspiration" or are "lethargic after a restless night" or those who have "no sense of the vitality of / renewed rhythm." The stuff just is not for everyone. Some people have such tired blood that they need "daily injections of rhythm and blues." The side effects are mild but must be noted; most serious are "the devastating effects of semantics and hyperbole." The warnings are solemn. "Do not read poetry of any kind if you suffer from any of the following," the index suggests. "Loose haiku practitioners" beware. Those taking this medication "without consulting with a local poet / May have to be hospitalized immediately." Remedies are available but "only your local / poet-in-residence can determine / the ultimate damage done to your system." Those experiencing a "deconstructionist crisis" or "outrageous swings of ups and downs" may discover that the "art of poesy" is not for them. Read the labels. Try to hear the mumbled warnings about side effects. Seek professional advice. Take the antidotes. Lighten up, and enjoy. Even when experimental or outlandish, Martin's work is, above all, direct, honest, and unpretentious. His "story is simple," writes Andrea M. Garnes: "He loves to write, so he does. No hype. No image to live up to. No melodrama. He just writes. Or as he says 'makes a poem'" (Dayton Voice, July 28, 1997). "I try not to use my poetry as therapy," he says-and for his Conclusion

213

clarity and precision he was chosen in 1997 as one of forty-five finalists (out of sixteen hundred entrants) in the National Poetry Series, the equivalent to an Academy Award nomination. "I will appropriate from many disciplines or any genre any effect which seems to work in print," he admits ("Fire" 20). Ultimately he does his work "for the sheer pleasure it brings" ("Paper, Pen, Scissors, Tape: Some Thoughts on Teaching," HWMP). His goal, finally, is "to sing as many arias as I can before I lose my voice completely. I no doubt will write until I can no longer complete a poem or finish a line. In the meantime, I hope I have written a worthy body of poems which will take their place in the canon someday" ("Aria," HWMP). At the end of the day-like his partner Dunbar-Martin has experienced "hours of toil" and days with little ease. Nonetheless, as Dunbar's poet concludes, "Since life is sweet and love is long, / I sing my song, and all is well."!

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Appendix A Brief Herbert Woodward Martin Chronology

1933 1948 1952 1955 1959-60

1964

1967 1968 1969 1970 1972

Martin is born in Birmingham, Alabama, where he spends his childhood and early adolescent years. Family moves to Toledo, Ohio, where he enrolls in Scott High School. Martin graduates from high school and enrolls at the University of Toledo. His first published poem, "Invention and Imagination," appears in America Sings. Martin wins a series of fellowships to Writer's Conferences at Antioch College, the University of Michigan, the University of Colorado, and the Breadloaf Writer's Conference. He moves to New York City, where he works for World Publishing Company, sings in Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, and performs his poems in coffeehouses. Martin graduates from the University of Toledo and he returns to New York City, where his play A Dialogue is produced at the Hardware Poets Theater. Martin accepts his first full-time college teaching position at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Martin earns his master's degree from Breadloaf School of English. First book of poems, New York the NineMillionand OtherPoems, is published. Martin is assistant professor and poet-in-residence at the University of Dayton. Martin organizes and hosts the Paul Laurence Dunbar Centennial Celebration in Dayton. • 215 •

1973

1976

1979

1980

1981

1984

1986 1988 1989 1990-91 1992 1993 1995

1996

1999

216

Martin's second volume of poetry, The Shit-Storm Poems, is published. He is Visiting Distinguished Professor at Central Michigan University. ThePersistence ofthe Flesh, a collection of poems, is published, and the first version of The Logof the Vigilante appears in ObsidianI. Martin and Elizabeth Susan Altman wed. Martin earns the doctor of arts degree at Carnegie-Mellon University. The Ohio Historical Society publishes Martin's monograph, Paul Laurence Dunbar:A Singerof Songs. His fourth book of poems, The Formsof Silence, is published. Martin guest edits a special issue of TheGreatLakesReview:A Midwest Miscellany for RobertHayden. Martin's daughter Julia is born. "The Herbert Woodward Martin Papers," a special collection of manuscripts, publications, and correspondence, is established at the Canaday Center, University of Toledo Library. PaulLaurence Dunbar (a video) is produced. Martin hosts Emily Dickinson Centennial at the University of Dayton. Martin guest edits special issue of The University ofDayton Review on Dickinson. Martin serves as interim poetry editor for World Order. Martin holds a Fulbright Scholarship in Pees, Hungary. Martin creates and performs in the video Paul Laurence Dunbar: TheEyes of the Poet. Martin discovers the manuscript of Dunbar's play Herrick, and the idea for a collection of unpublished Dunbar works is born. Martin arranges and creates additional lyrics for Dayton Opera's production of PaulLaurence Dunbar: CommonGround, with music by Adolphus Hailstork. The University of Toledo Notables Exhibition features Martin's life and works. Martin receives the Ohio Humanities Council Bjornson Award, is writer-in-residence at the Paul Laurence Dunbar House, and is made the City of Dayton Paul Laurence Dunbar Poet Laureate. His opera It Paysto Advertise debuts in Dayton. His fifth book of poems, Galileo's Suns, is published. The Logof the Vigilante wins the Mellen Narrative Poetry Prize.

Appendix

2000

2002

2003

Two books of poems, A Matter of Honor and The Logof the Vigilante, are published. Martin begins performances of Dunbar accompanied by jazz saxophonist Willie Morris. In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, coedited with Ronald Primeau, is published. Martin receives the Ohio Governor's Award in the category of individual artist. Martin receives an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Dayton and the Mark Twain Award for contributions in literature from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. Martin is working on an edition of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry to be published in 2004 and collaborating with Adolphus Hailstock on a cantata about Crispus Attucks.

Appendix

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Notes

A Note on the Herbert Woodward Martin Papers, 1940-2003 (a special collection in the Ward M. Canaday Center at the University of Toledo Library) Eighteen boxes of cataloged materials, gathered over twenty years, include Martin's own journals, manuscripts, and publications; correspondence from and to a variety of professional and personal associates; audio and visual materials as well as printed documents about Martin's many projects over the years; and art work, music, librettos, and ephemera, as well as family papers and financial and legal documents. Materials are cataloged in three separate groupings processed as they were received. Martin was a meticulous and thorough collector of memorabilia over the years, and this collection reflects his passion for theater and music and his habit of meeting and staying in touch with a wide variety of people-including the famous and influential-in many walks of life. Programs autographed by musicians and movie stars, items collected in world travels, correspondence with famous authors, and reviews of his own performances appear alongside his own student papers and notebooks, instructional materials from his teaching, and drafts of his published works as well as works in progress. The collection measures 46.5 linear feet and is open to the public. A finding aid is available from the University of Toledo. The "A Select Bibliography of Works by Herbert W. Martin, 1955-2003" that follows is an expanded version of a list originally prepared in 1999 by the staff of the Ward M. Canaday Center, University of Toledo, and is used by permission.

1.

Childof the Depression

All quotes in this paragraph can be found on page 343. All quotations in the next three paragraphs are from an unpublished notebook in HWMP. 1.

2.

• 218·

3. Author's notes on growing up in Alabama, quoted throughout this paragraph, HWMP. 4. Unless noted otherwise, all quotes from unpublished material in this chapter can be found in HWMP. 5. An autographed program of Warfield's concert at the Toledo Museum of Art on February 2, 1955, is in Martin's Collected Papers.

2.

Contrapuntal Imagination

1. "One Long Breath: A Belcanto Aria in the Style of Gaetano Donizetti," HWMP. Quotes that follow are from this essay. 2. All quotes in this paragraph are from HWMP. 3. Manuscript of the address in HWMP. All quotes in this paragraph are from that text. 4. The quotes in this paragraph are found on pages 13-15.

3. Sight-Reading Dunbar

All quotations in this paragraph are on pages 6-8. Collected Poetry of PaulLaurence Dunbar, 4. Further quotations from Dunbar's poems are from this edition. 1.

2.

4.

"Interrupted Rhythms"

1. "The Deadwood Dick Poems," in TheShit-StormPoems, 29-35, hereafter cited by numbered poems and lines. 2. "Ezra Pound: A Reminiscence," Martin's introduction to his unpublished collection of tributes and remembrances, HWMP. 3. Though scheduled to be published, the review never appeared. Quotes are from Alvin Aubert's manuscript in HWMP. 4. He wrote the poem in 1969, and it has been reprinted in Robert Hayden, David J. Burrows, and Frederick R. Lapides, comps., Afro-American Literature: An Introduction (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971); Arnold Adoff, ed., ThePoetry of BlackAmerica: Anthologyof the Twentieth Century (New York: HarperCollins, 1973); and Jan Barry, Peace Is OurProfession: Poems and Passages of WarProtest (Montclair, N.J.: East River Anthology, 1981).

5.EmpoweringAudknc~ 1. Unpublished paper presented to Ohio Humanities Council, 1993. Quotes are from manuscript in HWMP.

Notes

219

2. Martin has moved several of these poems into his later collection The Logof the Vigilante. I have chosen to discuss the works here for the special ways they empower certain voices in the unpublished My Mother's Voice. See chapter 7 on the different context of these poems in TheLog. 3. Quotes are from unpublished manuscript in progress in HWMP.

6.

Celebrations

1. Included in Margaret Ferguson, Mary [o Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, eds., The NortonAnthologyof Poetry, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 1430. 2. Quotes are from a letter from Jerome to Martin, May 24, 1989, HWMP. 3. In GreatLakesReview:A Midwestern Miscellany 6, no. 2 (summer 1980): 1. 4. Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy, TheNortonAnthologyof Poetry, 1430. 5. All quotes are from the unpublished manuscript in HWMP.

7. ReclaimingHistory 1. The Logof the Vigilante (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2000). Quotations are from this version unless otherwise noted. 2. Percy Ross, "Thanks a Million," DaytonDailyNews, January 29, 1988, 16. 3. All quotes are from an unpublished manuscript copy of The Last Days of William Short in HWMP.

8. PaulLaurence Dunbar and HerbertWoodwardMartin in TheirOwn Voices

Ed. Herbert W. Martin and Ronald Primeau (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2002). 2. All references in this chapter to Dunbar's plays can be found in In His Own Voice: TheDramatic and Other Uncollected Works of PaulLaurence Dunbar, ed. Herbert W. Martin and Ronald Primeau (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2002). 1.

9. A Sound Outsideof HisHead 1. Martin's and Fennimore's collaborations are documented in considerable correspondence between the two in HWMP. 2. "RCCA Piano Benefit Fitting Tribute," Kite, November 25, 1981, 4. 3. A version of the poem called "At the Five and Dime" in a Broadside Press, broadside version, and "The Lady Has Her Say" as published in ThePersistence of the Flesh (Detroit, Mich.: Lotus Press, 1976), 64. 4. Fennimore in a letter to Martin, December 16, 1998, in HWMP. 5. The sixty-two minute compact disc also includes as well Fennimore's Eventide, songs based on Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems Inscape and Fennimore's in-

220

Notes

novative setting of Berlitz's Introduction toFrench. Reviewers in AmericanRecordGuide (July-Aug. 1990), and The National Association of Teaching of SingingJournal (Nov.Dec. 1990), praised the songs and Karen Williams's performance of them. 6. Jose Garcia Villa, Selected Poems and New (New York: McDowell, Obolnesky, 1958) is the source of all quotations that follow. 7.Mark Stryker, "Dunbar Play Debut Brief, Yet Moving," DaytonDailyNews, February 12,1995, C3. 8. Gerry Kaufhold, "World Premier of Dunbar Opera Friday," TheDayton Voice, February 9,1995,10. 9. "Common Ground: New Opera Delivers Paul Laurence Dunbar's Poetry on a High Note," University of Dayton Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 10-11.

10.

Remembrances and New Directions

1. Quoted from unpublished notes on remarks to students at University of Dayton, June 1999, in manuscript in HWMP. 2. All quotes from Southern Voices and Myths and Rituals are from unpublished manuscripts in HWMP. 3. This and the quotes that follow are in Samuel Beckett, Dijecta: Miscellaneous Writingsand a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 170-73·

Conclusion 1. "The Poet and His Song," TheCollected Poetryof PaulLaurence Dunbar, ed. Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1993), 4.

Notes

221

Works Cited

Adoff, Arnold, ed. ThePoetry of BlackAmerica:Anthologyofthe TwentiethCentury. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Alexander, Margaret Walker. Review of PaulLaurence Dunbar:A Singerof Songs by Herbert Martin. GreatLakesReview 7, no. 1 (Winter 1981): 71. Ali, Derek. "UD Commencement, an Ending, Beginning." DaytonDailyNews, May 6,2002.

Altman, Elizabeth Susan. "On This Morning." GreatLakesReview 6, no. 1 (1979): 79. - - - . "Traveling Poem I." GreatLakesReview 5, no. 2 (1979): 79. - - - . "The Watch." GreatLakesReview 6, no. 1 (1979): 80. - - . "YouTreat Dough as Enemy." Great Lakes Review 9, no. 2; 10, no. 1 (1983-84): 89. American Heritage Dictionary of theEnglish Language. New York:Houghton-Mifflin, 1973. "An Interview with Herb Martin." Isthmus, March 10, 1969. Archdeacon, Tom. "Rhyme with Reason: Professor Breathes Life into Dunbar's Poetry." DaytonDailyNews, July 18,1993. Aubert, Alvin. Review of ThePersistence of the Flesh. Unpublished manuscript, n.d. HWMP. Bakhtin, Mikhail. TheDialogicalImagination: FourEssays. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981.

- - - . Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984. Baldwin, James. TheFire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963. Barry, Jan, ed. Peace Is OurProfession: Poems and Passages of War Protest. New York: East River Anthology, 1981. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Beckett, Samuel. Dijecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press, 1984. Bernstein, Mark. "Doctor Martin and Mister Dunbar." Ohio (Feb. 1995): 23-27. Bigsby, C. W. E. The SecondBlackRenaissance: Essays in BlackLiterature. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1980. • 222·

Bontemps, Arna. "The Slave Narrative: An American Genre." Introduction to Great SlaveNarratives. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Bookof Days:An Encyclopedia of Information Sources on Historical Figures and Events, Keyed to Calendar Dates. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pierian Press, 1986. The section on Paul Laurence Dunbar is on pages 305-7. Brooks, Gwendolyn. ToDisembark. Chicago: Third World Press, 198I. Brown, Big."The SeveralVoicesof Herbert Martin." GrandRapids Press, March 29,1970. Canella, Joe. "Central Michigan U.to Gain Distinguished Prof. Martin." UD Flyer News, March 23,1973. Cantrell, Scott. "Joseph Fennimore Begins to Gain National Recognition." Times Union, December 17, 1985. Chapman, Abraham, ed. BlackVoices: An AnthologyofAfro-American Literature. New York: Mentor, 1968. "City Awaits World Premier of Dunbar Opera." OakwoodRegister, January 31, 1995. Clarke, George Elliott. Review of The Logof the Vigilante. African-American Review 36, no. 2 (2002): 350-5I. Clarke, John Henrik. "The Origin and Growth of Afro-American Literature." Negro Digest 27 (Dec. 1967): 54-67. Cleaver, Eldridge. Soulon Ice. New York: Dell, 1968. Clemens, Will, ed. AllShookUp: Poemsfor and aboutElvisPresley. Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press, 200I. Cochran, Molly. "Herbert Woodward Martin: The Poet and His Craft." Ohioana Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 60-62. "Common Ground: New Opera Delivers Paul Laurence Dunbar on a High Note." University of Dayton Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 10-lI. "Composers Are Forever." The Village Voice, May 27,197I. "Crowd Drawn to Poetry Readings." Central Michigan Life, February 23,1973. Curti, Merle. "Dime Novels and the American Tradition." Yale Review 26 (1937): 763-67. Davis, Mickey. "Dunbar Portrayal Sparkles." DaytonDailyNews, February 6, 1992. Dempsey, Laura. "Words Worthy of Praise," DaytonDailyNews, February 10, 2002. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetryof PaulLaurence Dunbar. Ed. Joanne M. Braxton. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1993. - - . InHisOwnVoice: TheDramaticandOtherUncollected Works ofPaulLaurenceDunbar. Ed. Herbert W. Martin and Ronald Primeau. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2002. "Dunbar's Works Praised." University ofDaytonFlyer News, October 24,1972. Durham, Philip, and Everett L.Jones. TheNegro Cowboys. New York:Dodd, Mead, 1965. Engle, Gary D. This Grotesque Essence: Playsfrom the AmericanMinstrelStage. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978. Fedders, Barb. "Emily Dickinson: American Poet." University of Dayton CampusReport, September 26, 1986. "Fennimore: Berlitz Introduction to French; Inscape, Six Songs, Eventide." American Record Guide (July-Aug. 1990): 48. Ferguson, Margaret; Mary [o Salter; and Jon Stallworthy. eds. TheNortonAnthology ofPoetry. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1996.

Works Cited

223

Fiske, John. Readingthe Popular. New York: Routledge, 1989. - - - . Understanding PopularCulture. New York: Routledge, 1989. Garnes, Andrea M. "The Poem Maker." TheDayton Voice 5, no. 26 (July 2-8,1997): 8. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition: From Seen to the Told. " In Afro-American LiteraryStudy in the 199 os, ed. Houston A. Baker and Patricia Redmond, 14-50. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989. - - - . SignifyingMonkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literature. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. - - - , and Nelly Y. McKay. TheNortonAnthologyofAfricanAmericanLiterature. New York: Norton, 1997. Gayle, Addison, Jr. Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1971. - - - , ed. TheBlackAesthetic. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1972. Goldberg, Daniel. "RCCA Piano Benefit Fitting Tribute." Kite, November 25, 1981. Greasley, Phillip, ed. A Dictionaryof Midwestern Culture. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000. Greinke, L. Eric, ed. 10 Michigan Poets. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Pilot, 1972. Hart, James D. The PopularBook: A History of America's Literary Taste. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1963. Hayden, Robert. American journal. New York: Liveright, 1981. - - . Collected Poems of RobertHayden. Ed. Frederick Glaysher. New York: Liveright, 1970.

Hayden, Robert, David J.Burrows, and Frederick R. Lapides, eds. Afro-American Literature:An Introduction. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New BlackPoetry: BlackSpeech and BlackMusicas Poetic References. New York: William Morrow, 1973. "Herbert Martin Reads Poetry." CommuterNewspaper 9, no. 5 (1975): 1, 11. "Herbert Woodward Martin." Ohio (May 2002): 136. "Herbert Woodward Martin to Receive Bjornson Humanities Award." Pathways 20, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 2, 7. Special Ohio forum edition. Hughes, Allen. "Joseph Fennimore Makes Song Cycle of Berlitz Method." New York Times, May 21,1971. Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." In The NortonAnthology of African-American Literature, ed. Henry Lewis Gates Jr. and Nelly Y. McKay, 1267-71. New York: Norton, 1997. Originally published in TheNation 122 (June 28, 1926), 692-94. Jones, Daryl E. "Of Few Days and Full of Trouble: The Evolution of the Western Hero in the Dime Novel." In New Dimensionsin PopularCulture, ed. Russel B.Nye, 107-34. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1972. Kai, Nubia. Review of A Milestone Sampler:istb AnniversaryAnthology.CityArts Quarterly 3, no. 4 (Winter 1988-89): 27. Kaufhold, Gerry. "World Premier of Dunbar Opera on Friday." Dayton Voice, February 9,1995.

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Kiefer, Michael. "Singing Poet Wows Capacity Audience." AquinasHerald, March 14, 1968.

Madgett, Naomi Long, ed. MilestoneSampler: 15thAnniversary Anthology. Detroit, Mich.: Lotus Press, 1988. Mailer, Norman. Advertisementsfor Myself. New York: Putnam, 1959. Martin, Jay, ed. A Singerin the Dawn: Reinterpretations of PaulLaurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. Martin, Jay, and Gossie Hudson. The PaulLaurence Dunbar Reader:A Selection of the Bestof PaulLaurence Dunbar'sPoetryand Prose, IncludingWritings NeverBeforeAvailablein BookForm. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. Morris, Terry. "UD Professor Finds Dunbar Original," Dayton Daily News, August 18,1993.

"The Music of Joseph Fennimore." TheNationalAssociation of Teachers of Singinglourna147, no. 2 (Nov.-Dec. 1990): 47-48. Pettit, Michael, ed. The WritingPath I. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1995. "Poet Martin Storms Campus." CommuterNewspaper 9, no. 5 (1975): 6-7. "The Poet and His Song." Dimensions 8, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 1. Poole, Rosey. BeyondtheBlues: NewPoems byAmericanNegroes. London: Lympne, Kent, and Flower Press, 1962. Pountney, Rosemary. Theatreof Shadows:Samuel Beckett'sDrama, 1956-76. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, U.K.: Colin Smythe, 1998. Primeau, Ronald. "Herbert W. Martin." In A Dictionary of Midwestern Culture, ed. Phillip Greasley, 345-47. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000. - - - . TheRhetoricof Television. New York: Longman's, 1979. - - - . "Slave Narrative Turning Midwestern: Deadwood Dick Rides into Difficulty." In MidAmerica I, ed. David D. Anderson, 16-35. East Lansing, Mich. : Midwestern Press, 1974. - - - . Writing in the Margin: From Annotation to CriticalEssay. New York: David McKay, 1976. Randall, Dudley, ed. TheBlackPoets: A New Anthology. New York: Bantam, 1971. Ring, Cassie, and John Fleischman. "Star Professors." Ohio (Apr. 1992): 30-33. Ross, Percy. "Thanks a Million." DaytonDailyNews, January 29, 1988. Shelnutt, Eve. "UD's Herb Marin: What the Black Poet Is About." Rap 1, no. 11 (Nov. 1970): 20-22.

- - - . TheWritingRoom:Keys to the Craftof Fiction and Poetry. Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet Press, 1989. - - , ed. MyPoorElephant: 27 MaleWriters at Work. Atlanta, Ga. : Longstreet Press, 1992. Simmons, Carol. "Dunbar 'Suite' Credit to Community." DaytonDailyNews, March 19,1996.

- - - . "Dunbar's Poetry Gives Rhythm to Suite." DaytonDailyNews, March 17, 1996. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: TheAmerican Westas Symboland Myth. New York: Vintage, 1957. Stryker, Mark. "Dunbar Play Debut Brief Yet Moving." DaytonDailyNews, February 12, 1995.

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"The Tape Recorder War." Time, April 20, 1981. Thrasher, Don. "Man of Letters: Herbert Woodward Martin Receives Ohio Governor's Award for Arts." Impact Weekly, March 14-20,2002. "UD Professor Finds Unpublished Dunbar Play." Fairborn DailyHerald, August 31, 1993.

"University Marks Dunbar Centennial." University ofDaytonAlumnus (Dec. 1972): 2. "Unpublished Dunbar Play Discovered." Columbus Dispatch, August 27,1993. Villa, Jose Garcia. Selected Poems and New. New York: McDowell, Obolnesky, 1958. Webb, Walter Prescott. TheGreatFrontier. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. "Writing in the City." CityArts Quarterly 3, no. 4 (Winter 1988-89): 27.

226

Works Cited

A Select Bibliography of Works by

Herbert W Martin: 1955-2003 Arranged Chronologically

"Invention and Imagination." In AmericaSings: 1955 Anthologyof College Poetry, 133. Los Angeles: National Poetry Association, 1955. "For Richard Joel Baron." The Tower 1, no. 1 (Fall 1955): 23. "Man without a Country." The Tower 1, no. 2 (Winter 1956): 15. "Brown Is My Face." The Tower 1, no. 3 (Spring 1956): 15. "If I Could Burn at the Flesh of the Sun." In AmericaSings: 1958 Anthologyof College Poetry, 47. Los Angeles: National Poetry Association, 1958. "Now Is the Crushing Time." Ohio PoetrySociety Bulletin 19, no. 12 (Dec. 1958): 4. "Water." Ohio Poetry Review 1, no. 3 (Spring 1959): 9. "Elegy For Hamp Martin." Ohio Poetry Society Bulletin 20, no. 4 (Apr. 1959): 3. "Cry the Minority for a Place to Stand." Ohio Poetry Society Bulletin 20, no. 8 (Dec. 1959): 1. "Song Variation." Boulder and Flints: From the Poetry Workshop, 8th series (July 24Aug. 12, 1960): 18. University of Colorado. Untitled. Boulder and Flints: From the Poetry Workshop, 8th Series (July 24-Aug. 12, 1960): 18. "First Seasons." Poetry Dial 1, no. 2 (Spring 1961): 21. "Reunion." SeventhStreet: A LiteraryQuarterly (Spring 1962): 21. "Variation of Edith Sitwell." SeventhStreet: A LiteraryQuarterly (Spring 1962): 21-22. "Lines to Hart Crane." SeventhStreet: A LiteraryQuarterly (Spring 1962): 22. Untitled. New StudentReview, no. 10 (n.d.): 41. The State University of New York at Buffalo. "Reunion." Gallery 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1963): 12. "The Senses Are Tripled by Three." Fiasco, no. 11(Winter 1963): 11-12.University of Toledo. "Letter to the Editor." Collegian, May 1,1964. "A Particular Way of Dying." Fiasco, no. 12 (Fall 1964): 21. Untitled: For Denver Duncan. Manuscripts (Mar. 1965): 23. The State University of New York at Buffalo. • 227·

Untitled: For Charles Armey. Manuscripts (Mar. 1965): 24. "When I Am Done Dreaming." Manuscripts (Mar. 1965): 25. "Boy with Gratitude in His Too-Late Hands." Fiasco, no. 14 (Summer 1965): 7. "The Nun at the General Motors Building." Fiasco, no. 14 (Summer 1965): 8. "Speech to the Empire State Building." Fiasco, no. 14 (Summer 1965): 9. "Homage to Ezra Pound." Fiasco, no. 14 (Summer 1965): 10. "Antigone 1,2." Micromegas 1, no. 3 (Winter 1966): 29-30. "In the Very Savage Fall." Micromegas 1, no. 3 (Winter 1966): 31. "Oedipus to Antigone." The GuppyFancyer's Quarterly 1, no. 1 (Spring 1967): 14. "A Fifth of Water." Free Poems/AmongFriends 1, no. 3 (Summer 1967): 8. "Homage to Ezra Pound." Descant: The TexasChristian University LiteraryJournal 11, no. 4 (Summer 1967): 28. "A Particular Way of Dying." Presence: A Magazine of the Revolution, no. 1 (Summer 1967): 24·

"Billy the Kid." Presence: A Magazineof the Revolution, no. 1 (Summer 1967): 24. "Poem." Presence: A Magazineof the Revolution, no. 1 (Summer 1967): 25. "A Smile, a Hand, a Heart, Love Begins This Way." Presence: A Magazineof the Revolution, no. 1 (Summer 1967): 25. "A Recollection, a Realization. Presence: A Magazineof the Revolution, no. 1 (Summer 1967): 26.

"I Dream You Harlem." Intrepid, no. 8 (June 1967): 25. "The Senses Are Tripled by Three." TheArcher:A Verse Quarterly 25, no. 3 (Autumn 1967): 23.

"Contrapuntal Pieces for Central Park West." New Student Review 16 (1967): 67-68. State University of New York, Buffalo. "Antigone IV." New Student Review 18 (1967): 16. "Billy the Kid." New Student Review 18 (1967): 55. "Ah, David!" New Student Review 19 (1967): 15. "Antigone V." New Student Review 19 (1967): 16. "The Nun at the General Motors Building." Tennessee PoetryJournal 1, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 32.

"After the Monumental Death of a Summer." ArtsinSociety: Happenings andIntermedia 5, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1968): 167. "W Poem 11." Anon (1969): 40-41. The University of Michigan. "Sunflower Seeds." Epoch 18, no. 3 (Spring 1969): 285. "The Reflection Is a Pleasant Entertainment." Epoch 18, no. 3 (Spring 1969): 285. "Contrapuntal Pieces for Central Park West." Labris (Apr. 1969): 55. "Thought." Encore: A Ouarterlyof Verse and Poetic Arts 3, no. 4 (Summer 1969): 17· "Epistle." FineArts Discovery (Summer 1969): 26. "Poem." FineArts Discovery (Fall 1969): 7. "Poem." FineArts Discovery (Fall 1969): 9. "New York the Nine Million." New Orleans Review 1, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 180-81. "A Particular Way of Dying." Aquinas College Magazine 6, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 10. "If I Should Speak of Love." Aquinas College Magazine 6, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 10. "Sunflower Seeds." Aquinas College Magazine 6, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 10. 228

WorksCited

"The Reflection Is a Pleasant Entertainment." AquinasCollege Magazine 6, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 10. "Contrapuntal Piece Number Three." AquinasCollege Magazine6, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 1I. New York the NineMillionand OtherPoems. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Abra Cadabra Press, 1969. "Antigone IV." Trace 72/73 (Autumn 1970): 7. "Antigone V." Trace 72/73 (Autumn 1970): 7. "Seen in Every Man's Eye Is a Formal Garden." Cardinal: Poetry Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 8. A Review of Brothers and Sisters. Rap. 2, no. 2 (Feb. 1971): 22-23. "Poem." WorldOrder 5, no. 3 (Spring 1971): 47. "Whiskey Is a Paradox." Sumac:An ActiveAnthology 3, no. 3 (Spring 1971): 43. Untitled. Sumac:An ActiveAnthology 3, no. 3 (Spring 1971): 43. "A Particular Way of Dying." Tempest, no. 4 (Spring-Summer 1971): 9. "The Deadwood Dick Poems." Rap. 2, no. 5 (May 1971): 24-26. "The Air Is." Chelsea 29 (July 1971): 4I. "The Brain And." Chelsea 29 (July 1971): 42. "I Have Been." Chelsea 29(July 1971): 4I. "The Harsh Rains." Chelsea 29 (July 1971): 42. "As Close To." Chelsea 29 (July 1971): 42. "A Negro Soldier's Viet Nam Diary." In Afro-American Literature: An Introduction, ed. Robert Hayden, David J. Burrows, and Frederick R. Lapides, 146-47. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 197I. "From the Deadwood Dick Poems." The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 13, no. 1 (Oct. 1971): 65-67. "Ballet Is a Love Affair." Rap 2, no. 11(Nov. 1971): 6-12. "Pieces towards an Autobiography." Confrontation: Ajournal of Third WorldLiterature 1, no. 2 (1971): 58-60. A Review of ThePoem Singinginto YourEyes. Rap 2, no. 12 (Dec. 1971): 31-32. "Walker Evans' Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer's Wife." Amarunthus: National Literary Magazine, no. 7 (Winter 1972): 36. "Visiting the Museum." Amarunthus:National Literary Magazine, no. 7 (Winter 1972): 79. "Museum Piece." Amarunthus: National LiteraryMagazine, no. 7 (Winter 1972): 79. Untitled. Insight:A Monthly Publication of the Centerfor Afro-American Affairs, no. 2. (Jan. 1972): 5. A departmental newsletter at the University of Dayton. "Epistle from My Heart: Keeping Track of What You Think." In Writingin the Margin, ed. Ronald Primeau, 187.New York: David McKay, 1972. Untitled. InvisibleCity, no. 4 (Feb. 1972): 1I. "Epistle from My Heart." Rap 3, no. 3 (Mar. 1972): 27-30. "Seen in Every Man's Eye Is a Formal Garden." Creative Moment:AJournalof Creative Writingand Criticism (Spring 1972): 30. "A Personal Reflection." Rap 3, no. 10(Oct. 1972): 6-8. "Address to Mr. Charlie." In 10 Michigan Poets, ed. L. Eric Greinke, 106. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Pilot Press, 1972.

Works Cited

229

"If I Should Speak of Love." In 10 MichiganPoets, 107. "The Nun at the General Motors Building." In 10 MichiganPoets, 107. "Reunion." In 10 MichiganPoets, 108. "Poem." In 10 MichiganPoets, 108. "Contrapuntal Piece No.8." In 10 MichiganPoets, 109. "Antigone XL" In 10 MichiganPoets, 109. "Quietly, Quietly, They Remembered Those Who Died." In 10 MichiganPoets, 110. "Early Chaos Chaste Zandles." In 10 MichiganPoets, 110. "The Deadwood Dick Poems." In 10 MichiganPoets, 111-17. "Address to Mr. Charlie." GrandRapid News, January 24, 1973. "First Poem for the New Year." GaySunshine:A Newspaperof GayLiberation, no. 19 (Sept.-Oct. 1973): 16. TheShit-Storm Poems. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Pilot Press, 1973. "W. Poem 11/2." GaySunshine:ANewspaper of GayLiberation, no. 19(Sept.-Oct. 1973): 16. "Botticelli's Venus." Images 1, no. 1 (1974): 8. "Antigone." Images 1, no. 1 (1974): 8. "November I." WorldOrder 9, no. 4 (Summer 1975): 59. "November 2." WorldOrder 9, no. 4 (Summer 1975): 59. "The Garden of Delights: Hell." PoetryAustralia, no. 59 (June 1976): 30-32. "From History: The Log of the Vigilante." PoetryAustralia, no. 59 (June 1976): 32. "History: The Log of the Vigilante." Obsidian: BlackLiteratureReview 2, no. 3 (Winter 1976): 58-67. ThePersistence of the Flesh. Detroit, Mich.: Lotus Press, 1976. "Coyote." TheGreat Lakes Review:Ajournalof MidwestCulture 4, no. 1(Summer 1977): 77. "Siren." Higginson journal ofPoetry, no. 16, pt. 1 (1977): 21. "Blues Piece from the Log of the Vigilante." Nimrod 21, no. 2; 22, no. 1 (1977): 149-50. "Contrapuntal Piece No. 13." GraduateNewsletter 6, no. 5 (Fall 1977): 14-15. "The Forms of Silence." GraduateNewsletter 6, no. 6 (Spring 1978): 11. "Sonnet: The Expense of Memory." GraduateNewsletter 6, no. 6 (Spring 1978): 12. "Ballad of a Fire." GraduateNewsletter 6, no. 6 (Spring 1978): 11. "Death Is a Departure in Love." Orpheus 12 (Spring 1978): 18. Review of 0 Africa, whereI baked my bread by Lance Jeffers. TheGreatLakesReview:A journal ofMidwest Culture 5, no. 1 (Summer 1978): 107-10. "I Sing of an Earth That Is Yet Astonishing." PoetryAustralia, no. 67 (July 1978): 60. "Snow." OaklandReview 6 (1978): 26. "At This Time." Waves, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1979): 44. "The Log of the Vigilante." Waves, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1979): 45. "Omega Point." Tribute (April 1979): 4. Published by the Office of Student Development, University of Dayton. PaulLaurence Dunbar:A Singerof Songs. Columbus: State Library of Ohio, 1979. "The Geography of Knowledge." Unpublished poem. (Apr. 11,1980). Poem written for the installment of the president, University of Dayton. TheFormsof Silence. Detroit, Mich.: Lotus Press 1980. "Preface (for Robert Hayden, 1913-1980)." The GreatLakesReview:A journal of Midwest Culture 6, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 1. Special number dedicated to Hayden. 230

Works Cited

"The Mind Is a Private Place." Orpheus (Spring 1981): 11.University of Dayton. "Everything Sensible and Everything Lovingly Human." Obsidian: BlackLiterature in Review 8, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 48-49. "On Julia's Birth." Images: A PoetryMagazine 8, no. 1 (1982): 8. "Pigeon Lady." Nexus (Fall 1983): 52. Review of ToDisembark by Gwendolyn Brooks. The GreatLakesReview 9, no. 2; 10, no. 1 (Fall 1983-Spring 1984), 109-12. "A Fifth of Air." Wisconsin Review 17, no. 1 (1983): 14. "Reward Poster." PoetryOhio, Art of the State:An Anthologyof OhioPoems. Special unnumbered issue of Cornfield Review, ed. David Citino (1984): 71. "After the Painting by Andrew Wyeth." Paunch, nos. 57/58 (Jan. 1984): 78. Untitled. Paunch, nos. 57/58(Jan. 1984): 101. Untitled. ThePegasus Review (October 1984): 2. "Girl, Birds, Wind, Clouds." Centennial Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 45. Untitled. TheGreatLakes Review:AJournalofMidwest Culture 11, no. 2 (Fall 1985): 81. "Atlanta." BlackAmericanLiterature Forum 19, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 110. "Chasing the Wind." Unknown: An Atlanta Creative AlliancePublication 12, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 55· "Do Not Ask." TheKindredSpirit:A PoetryJournal, no. 7 (Oct. 1, 1985): 11. "From the Log of the Vigilante." Glass Will, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 23-30. "The Deadwood Dick Poems." Cottonwood 38/39 (Summer-Fall 1986): 21-23. Contemporary black writers. "Julia's All American Garage Sale." Flights: A LiteraryVoicefor TheMiami Valley 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1987): 23. "A Few Epistles from the World." University of DaytonReview 19, no. 1 (Winter 198788): 3-4. Review of South Louisiana: New and Selected Poems by Alvin Aubert. BlackAmerican Literature Forum 21, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 343-48. "A Portfolio of Poems." WorldOrder 22, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall 1987-Winter 1987-88): 17. "Kite Flying." In A Milestone Sampler: isth Anniversary Anthology, ed. Naomi Long Madgett, 93. Detroit, Mich.: Lotus Press, 1988. "Memory Is the Braille the Winter Leaves." In A Milestone Sampler, 94. "Georgia O'Keefe." In A Milestone Sampler, 95. "The Washer Woman's Fire." In A Milestone Sampler, 96. "Dressing." In A Milestone Sampler, 97. "The Last Days of William Short." Vincent Brother's Review (Fall 1988): 15-17. "In the Evening." The Newport Review:AJournal of Art, Literature, and Ideas 3, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 30-33. "From the Last Days of William Short." Thejames White Review 6, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 8-9. "The Deadwood Dick Poems." PiedPiper(Apr. 15,1988): 21. Readings from the eighteenth annual Defiance College poetry day. "The Washer Woman's Fire." PiedPiper (April 15, 1988): 22. "Julia's All American Garage Sale." PiedPiper (April 15,1988): 23. "Chicago." PiedPiper (April 15, 1988): 24.

Works Cited

231

"Leaves." PiedPiper (April 15, 1988): 25. "Michelangelo's Pieces for Pope Julius II's Tomb." PiedPiper (Apr. 15, 1988): 26. "In Pompei." Poetryin the Park (1988): 33. "15,16,17." BlackAmericanLiteratureForum 23, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 75. From "The Last Days of William Short." "How the Deadwood Dick Poems Came into Being." In The WritingRoom:Keys to the Craftof Fiction, ed. Eve Shelnutt, 291-98. Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet Press, 1989. Untitled. BlackAmericanLiteratureForum 23, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 470. "The Last Days of William Short: XIV."Images: A Poetry Magazine14, no. 1 (1989): 8-9. "From 'The Log of the Vigilante: 0200 and 0400.'" VincentBrothersReview (Spring 1990): 28.

"Homeless." ThePannoniusPost 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1990): 4. "Walker Evans' Alabama Tenant Farmer 1936." Flights (n.d., ca. 1980s): 36. "Walker Evans' Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer's Wife 1936." Flights (n.d., ca. 1980s): 37·

"From Final W." Poetry 155, no. 6 (Mar. 1990): 402. "Neighbor." The G. W Review 11, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 48. "The Pigeon Lady." Riverrun (Fall 1990): 27. "The Washerwoman's Fire." GrandStreet 38 10, no. 2 (1991): 96. "Villanelle." SilverWings 9, no. 4 (Fall 1991) : 6. "A Foreigner's Post Card." RhodeIsland SeniorTimes (1991): 1. "Appropriate Words for Mourning." Stand (Winter 1991): 62. "Final W." GrandStreet 41 11, no. 1 (1992): 402. "Fire, Water, and the Ashes of Memory." In My PoorElephant:2 7 MaleWritersat Work, ed. Eve Shelnutt, 346-56. Atlanta, Ga.: Long Street Press, 1992. PaulLaurence Dunbar: TheEyesofthe Poet. Video recording. Produced by Herbert W. Martin. Directed by Thomas Skill. Department of English, University of Dayton, 1992. "Saturday Afternoon." Up Against the Wall, Mother 12, no. 1 (Jan. 1992): 18. "Abentua, the Woodcutter." TheRubiconReview 4, no. 4 (Mar.-Apr. 1993): 16-17. "Where the Wild Nettles Grow." House Organ, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 14. "The Dreamer Has Gone to Sleep." Perceptions (Summer 1993): 6. "Commenting on the Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar." Unpublished paper. Ohio Humanities Council, 1993. "The Dreamer Has Gone to Sleep." BlackIssuesin HigherEducation 10, no. 7 (June 3, 1993): 26-27.

"Image." SYNAESTHE TIC: AJournalof Poetry, Prose, and MediaArts 2 (Spring 1994): 4. "Found Poem." SYNAESTHE TIC: AJournalof Poetry, Prose, and MediaArts 2 (Spring 1994): 4·

"Out of the Dead Bones." Cincinnati Poetry Review, no. 25 (Spring-Summer 1994): 28. "The Garden of Earthly Delight." Writer'sForum 20 (1994): 41. Twentieth anniversary issue. PaulLaurence Dunbar: CommonGround. Opera. With music by Adolphus Hailstork. Produced by the Dayton Opera Company at the Victoria Theatre, Dayton, Ohio, February 19, 1995. HWMP. 232

Works Cited

"15." Nexus.Iournal OfLiteratureof Art 30 (Winter 1995): 77. "Csontvary Tivadar's 'Old Woman Peeling an Apple. '" Nexus: Journal of Literature and Art 30 (Winter 1995): 84. "A Matter of Honor." Crone's Nest:Wisdomof the Elderwoman, no. 3 (1996): 21. It Paysto Advertise. Opera. With music by Phillip Magnuson. Performed at the University of Dayton, 1996. HWMP. "World AIDS Day: A Time to Mourn, Remember." DaytonDailyNews, December 1, 1996. "Eyes." House Organ, no. 19 (Summer 1997): 7. "Spiritual." A New Song: ThePoetryof God'sPeople 3, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 1997-98): 22. Review of Fast Talk, Full Volume: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, ed. Alan Spears. AfricanAmericanReview 31, no. 2 (1997): 33-36. "Final Arrangements." A New Song: The Poetryof God'sPeople 3, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 1997-98): 21. "Where the Wild Nettles Grow." Nexus 34, no. 1 (1998): 86. "Neighbor." In FoodPoems, ed. Terry Hermsen and Lee Garrison, 48. Huron, Ohio: Bottom Dog Press, 1998. "Rwanda #1." Nexus 34, no. 1 (1998): 97. "Rwanda #4." Nexus 34, no. 1 (1998): 97. "Rwanda #7." Nexus 34, no. 1 (1998): 98. Galileo's Suns. In Dunbar:Sunsand Dominions, ed. David Shevin, 13-43. Huron, Ohio: Bottom Dog Press, 1999. A Matter of Honor. Premier Poets Chapbook Series 13. Portsmouth, R.I.: Michele F. Cooper, 1999. "Shalon, Chaver." PulsarPoetryMagazine 19 (Sept. 1999): 21. "Fireplace." TheHeartlands Today 9 (1999): 95-96. "Fragment for Emily Dickinson." Iota, no. 48 (1999): 8. "Congregational Windows." TheKerf (Summer 1999): 11. "The New Year Accomplished." FeatherBooks (Nov. 1999): 54. "Approaching New Years in Pees." ChaminadeLiteraryReview (Spring 1999): 175. Magnificat. Unpublished Mass, 2000. HWMP. "Sassy Music." Confluence 10 (1999): 51. "Remembering Ezra Pound." House Organ, no. 30 (2000): 7. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Poet and His Song." Ohio Chautauqua (June 13-July 16, 2000): 17-19,21.A companion reader, Ohio State University Humanities Institute. TheLogof the Vigilante. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 2000. '''A Bird Flew' from FinalW." TheKerf (Spring 2000): 34. "Advent." Windhover: AJournalof ChristianLiterature 5 (2000): 160. "Hunting." Manifold, no. 37 (2000): 24. "Miss Rosie Mae Watches Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show." In All Shook Up: Poems Forand About ElvisPresley, ed. Will Clemens, 2-3. Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press, 2001. "Silence." Newport Review, no. 1 (Nov. 2001): 2. "Breath." TheKerf (2001): 43. "A Fine Summer Rain." TheKerf (2001): 10.

Works Cited

233

"Shadows of Light." Sephia 66 (2001): 2. "Love." Manifold, no. 38 (May-July 2001): 3. "Final W (Rouault's Outline)." HQPoetryMagazine: TheHaikuQuarterly, no. 25 (2001): 15·

"Epistle to an Old Time." Chaminade LiteraryReview 22 and 23 (2002): 75. "The Archeologist." ChaminadeLiteraryReview 22 and 23 (2002): 166. "American Tourist," Out of Line (Feb. 2002): 13. In His Own Voice: TheDramatic and Other Uncollected Works of PaulLaurence Dunbar. Ed. Herbert W. Martin and Ronald Primeau. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2002. "Hustling." Words (Apr. 2002): 9. "Orson's Warof the Worlds." Words (2002): 50. "This." TheMid-America PoetryReview (Spring 2002): 41. "Painful Laughter." Manifold, no. 42 (Oct. 2002): 25. "Flying towards Minneapolis." California Quarterly 27, no. 4 (Mar. 2002): 12. "Observation: Tourist Lovers." Manifold, no. 40 (Apr. 2002): 14. "Waiting for Rumplestilskin." Manifold, no. 40 (Apr. 2002): 8-9. "Talent Thief." Confluence (Sept. 2002): 94. "Reluctant Heir. "Obioana 45, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 422-29. An essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar. "Ten Poems for Rwanda." AfricanAmericanReview 36, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 571-74.

234

Works Cited

Index

Adam Self. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: plays by Adoff, Arnold, 219n. Albee, Edward, 27, 29, 32, 171 Alexander, Margaret Walker. See Walker, Margaret Anderson, Marian, 167,171 Aquinas College, 36,46,48,64,215 Arnett, Carroll (Gogisgi), 113 Aubert, Alvin, 36, 51, 65, 85-86, 123 Aunt Jemima, 95, 139 "Been in the Storm So Long," 67, 80, 188 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 19, 25, 39, 167,173, 195, 206, 209 Bahktin, Mikhail, 58, 144-45, 197, 204 Baldwin, James, 68, 83 Baraka, Imamu Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 24, 28, 48,68 Baron, Robert, 14-15, 167,169-71 Barthes, Roland, 89-90 Beckett, Samuel, 206-7, 220n Bedard, B.J., 51 Birmingham, Alabama, 5-12,27,47,49-50 Bissell, Sarah, 16, 19-20, 34-35, 105, 107, 139 Blake, William, 175-76 Born, James, 164 Boyd, Melba, 65 Braxton, Joanne M., 54, 57,220n Breadloaf School of English (Middlebury College), 38-39, 40, 42, 64, 174, 215

Breadloaf Writer's Conference (Middlebury College), 21, 22, 36-37, 48, 215 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 123, 211 Canaday Center (University of Toledo), 19, 109, 177, 218 Carnegie-Mellon University, 36, 107, 108, 216 Carter G. Woodson Historical Papers, 55, 153 Central Michigan University,65,162-{)3, 176, 216 Chasingthe Wind. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress by Chestnutt, Charles, 159 "Chorus from the Rock:" For Voices, A." See Martin, Herbert Woodward: lyrics for music by Ciardi, John, 36 contrapuntal poems, 25-28, 43-46, 116-18 Copeland, Aaron, 168, 179 CrispusAttucks. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress by Crow, James Americanus, 138,144 Davis, Ossie, 137-38 Dayton Bach Society, 168-79 Dayton Opera Company, 166, 180, 216 Dayton Philharmonic, 179 Dayton Public Television, 181-85 Dayton, University of, 38, 46, 48-51, 64, 107, 109, 111-12, 123, 125, 150, 177, 179, 186, 192, 208, 211,215-17,220n Dee, Ruby, 137

• 235 •

DerRabe. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress by Dialogue, A. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: plays by Dickinson, Emily, 82, 111, 124-25, 144, 175-77, 209,216 Douglass, Frederick, 57 Dove, Rita, 143 Dunbar Centennial Celebration, 39, 62-65, 82, 124, 15I, 215 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 19, 46-63, 64, 88, 93, 106, 111-12,116, 122, 126, 128, 143-44, 149-66, 168, 179-85, 196-98, 206-8, 211, 216, 220n -works by: Clorindy, or the Originsof Cakewalk (musical), 150, 158-60; Collected Poetry, 54, 56-63, 219n, 220n; Dream Lovers (opera), 150; Herrick (play), 55,150-51, 153-57,163,216;Lyricsof Lowly Life (poems), 57; Majors and Minors (poems), 57; Dream Lovers(musical), 150; In Dahomey (musical), 150; Uncle Eph's Christmas (musical), 150-51, 160;]es Lak' White Fo'ks (musical), 151,160-64

Hailstork, Adolphus, 54, 158,166, 168, 180-85, 189, 216, 217 Harlem Renaissance, 35, 48, 57,165 Hayden, Robert, 35, 48, 53, 79, 109-14, 119, 143-44,216 Herbert Woodward Martin Papers (19402003), 109, 198, 216, 218 Hernton, Calvin, 23, 156 Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (Buffalo), 173 Holy Trinity Luthern Church (New York City), 173,195-96 "How the Deadwood Dick Poems Came into Being." See Martin, Herbert Woodward: essays by Hughes, Langston, 19, 41, 47, 69, 92, 143-44, 152, 190, 211

I Hate OperaCuide to Operain YourOwn Language, The. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress In His Own Voice. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: books by It Paysto Advertise. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: lyrics for music by

Eliot, T. S., 19, 41, 82, 175 Exits and Entrances.See Martin, Herbert Woodward: plays by Ezra Pound:A Reminiscence. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress by Fennimore, James, 64, 123, 168, 173-78, 220n, 221n "FewEpistlesfrom the World, A." See Martin, Herbert Woodward: essays by "Fire, Water, and AshesofMemory." See Martin, Herbert Woodward: essays by FinalW· The CancerFiles. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress Fiske, John, 90-93, 98, 159-60, 189, 197 Formsof Silence, The. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: books by Fuller, Hoyt, 65

Galileo's Suns. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: books by Gates, Henry Louis, [r., 54, 62, 125, 152, 158, 164-65 Gayle, Addison, [r., 49, 52

"Gift of Song, The." See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress Ginsberg, Allen, 19, 24, 68, 82 Giovanni, Nikki, 48, 51, 60 Gray, Ernest, 16, 19, 139 Creat LakesReview, The, 109, 113, 216, 220n

Janus Pannonius University (Fulbright Scholarship), 111, 127,216 Jeffers, Lance, 123,144 Jerome, Judson, 22, 110, 220n Johnson, James Weldon, 72 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Imamu Amiri

KingDid Not Applaud, The. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: plays by Knight, Etheridge, 49, 51, 65, 192 Last Days of William Short, The. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress Les Deux Megots, 22-28, 33-34, 44, 80, 82, 171,173,177, 211 Logof the Vigilante, The. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: books by

Index

Madgett, Naomi Long,

vertise (opera), 81, 166, 168, 185-89, 212, 216; PaulLaurenceDunbar: Common Ground (opera), 54, 158, 166, 168, 180-85, 216; Magnificat (Cantata), 168, 189; Nathan (opera), 28, 167, 171-73; "Son of

111

Magnificat. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: lyrics for music by Magnuson, Phillip, 123, 168, 178-80, 189 Martin, Elizabeth Susan Altman (wife), 1079, 114-16, 127, 191, 216 Martin, David (father), 7-8, 12, 13-14, 16, 22 Martin, Herbert Woodward: childhood in Alabama 2-12, 120, 166-67, 190, 192, 196, 198-99, 202-6, 215; moves to Toledo, Ohio 12-20,167,192,194-95; life and work in New York City in the 1960s 21-35, 48,166, 173-78,195-96; begins teaching 48; plans Dunbar Centennial 49-54, 215; develops Paul Laurence Dunbar one-man show 5463, 153,158-59, 162, 168, 182-83, 185,190, 196-98,206,208; marries Elizabeth Susan Altman, 108-9, 216; writes opera librettos

the Commandments, A," 169-70 -plays by: Adam Self, 28, 31; A Dialogue, 2728, 32-34, 64, 171, 215; Exits and Entrances, 28-29; TheKingDid Not Applaud, 28-31,

33, 139; ThreeGarageCans, 28, 32-33 -videos by: PaulLaurenceDunbar: TheEyes

of the Poet, 51, 54, 62, 88, 152, 216; Paul LaurenceDunbar, (Twentig Productions), 54, 109-10, 151-52, 216 -works in progress by: Chasingthe Wind, 126, 127, 211; Crispus Attucks (a Cantata), 189, 217; DerRabe, 111,124, 125; Ezra Pound:A Reminiscence, 82-83; Final W' The CancerFiles, 94, 101-6, 126, 137,139, 145, 211; The Gift of Song:TheDeath of Paul LaurenceDunbar, 184-85; I Hate Opera Guideto Operain YourOwn LanguageThe, 189; Last Days of William Short, The, 110, 129, 145-49, 220n; My Mother's Voice, 92, 94-101, 106, 136-37, 139, 220n; Myths and Rituals, 190, 199, 220n; On the FlyLeaf, 19, 211; Portsmouth, OhioPoemsThe, 212; Southern Voices, 9-12, 104, 127, 136, 145, 188, 190, 199, 202, 204, 211, 220n; Voices: A Requiemin the Wordsof Slaves, 189

79,123,165,166-89,206; research as Dunbar scholar 55, 106, 149-65 -books by: TheFormsof Silence, 54, 80, 90, 93-94, 107-23, 139, 216; Galileo's Suns, 9-12, 80,90,93,104,106-27,139,145,188,19099, 204, 212, 216; In HisOwn Voice (ed. with Ronald Primeau), 55, 150-65, 217,220n; A Matter of Honor, 106, 136, 190, 199-201, 204, 217; New York the NineMillion and OtherPoems, 11, 21, 25, 37,40-46, 90, 93, 177-78,212,215; TheLogof the Vigilante, 11, 33, 36, 54, 86, 92, 93, 94, 104, 106-7, 129-45, 149,165,189-90,201-~204,21~216-1~

Martin, Julia (daughter), 108-9, 126, 127,

220n; PaulLaurence Dunbar:A Singerof

199,216 Martin, Sarah (daughter), 122-23, 126, 177 Martin, Willie Mae (mother), 5-6, 12, 20, 35,

Songs, 52-53, 59-60, 108, 151,216; ThePersistence of the Flesh, 54, 70, 83-87, 89, 93, 145, 176, 178,188, 216, 220n; TheShit-Storm Poems, 39, 54, 66-80, 86, 89, 93, 139, 14445, 176, 188, 202, 212, 216, 219n. -essays by: "A Few Epistles from the World," 124-25; "Fire, Water, and the

40, 95, 97, 105-6, 123, 170, 191-95, 199200,204-6 Matter ofHonor, A. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: books by

Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 63, 111

Ashes of Memory," 3-10, 12, 16, 35-37, 94,210,214; "How the Deadwood Dick Poems Came into Being," 73; "One Long

minstrel shows, 159-61 Morris, Willie, 211, 217 My Mother's Voice. See Martin, Herbert

Breath: A Belcanto Aria in the Style of

Woodward: works in progress

Gaetano Donizetti," 33-35, 214, 219n; "Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Vision

Myths and Rituals. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress

of Community," 94-95,152-53; "Reluctant Heir," 47, 52 -lyrics for music by: "A Chorus from the Rock: For Voices," 170-71; It Paysto Ad-

Nathan. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: lyrics for music by Nemerov, Howard, 110-:-11

Index

237

Neuman, Irene, 20, 139 New York TheNineMillionand OtherPoems. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: books by Northrop, Solomon, 139 Ohio Historical Society, 108, 150, 153,216 Ohio Arts Council, 210, 211,217 Ohio Governor's Award, 210, 217 Ohio Humanities Council, 56, 88, 152, 216, 219n On the FlyLeaf. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress "One Long Breath: A Belcanto Aria in the Style of Gaetano Donizetti." See Martin, Herbert Woodward: essays by Patterson, Raymond, 23, 51, 111, 118,125 "Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Vision of Community." See Martin, Herbert Woodward: essays by PaulLaurenceDunbar (Twentig Productions). See Martin, Herbert Woodward: videos by PaulLaurenceDunbar: TheEyesof the Poet.See Martin, Herbert Woodward: videos by PaulLaurenceDunbar: CommonGround. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: lyrics for music by PaulLaurenceDunbar:A Singerof Songs.See Martin, Herbert Woodward: books by Persistence of the Flesh, The. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: books by Piccadilly Poets, The, 177, 190, 192 Poole, Rosey, 35, 112 Portsmouth, Ohio Poems, The. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress Pound, Ezra, 19, 26, 35, 48, 64, 81-83, 118, 144, 175-77,209 Randall, Dudley, 48-49, 62, 65, 211 "Reluctant Heir." See Martin, Herbert Woodward: essays by Redding, Saunders, 51 Reece, Jane, 211 Roberts, Len, 48, 192

Sanchez, Sonia, 49, 51, 65 Scheele, Roy, 67-68, 86-87 Shapiro, Karl, 148, 167 Shelnutt, Eve, 61, 69, 93 Shevin, David, 190-91 Shit-Storm Poems, The. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: books by Sitwell, Edith, 19, 168, 176-78 Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, 210-11, 217 "Son of the Commandments, A." See Martin, Herbert Woodward: lyrics for music by Southern Voices. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress by State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, 35-37, 173 Still, William Grant, 168, 179-80

ThreeGarbageCans.See Martin, Herbert Woodward: plays by Till, Emmet, 167,170-71 Time magazine, 110 Toledo, University of, 1-2, 8, 15-21, 34, 47, 61,81-82,105,107,109,157,166,177,198, 215-16,218 Troupe, Quincy, 65 Truth, Sojourner, 138 Villa, Jose Garcia, 177-79, 220n Voices: A Requiemin the Wordsof Slaves. See Martin, Herbert Woodward: works in progress by Walker, Alice, 49, 51, 53, 65 Walker, David, 131-34, 138,143 Walker, George, 167 Walker, Margaret, 51-53, 55, 60, 152 Warfield, William, 16-17, 82 Wheatley, Phillis, 125, 209 Wilbur, Richard, 108, 175 Williams, Miller, 36-37, 70 World Publishing Company, 21, 27, 34-35, 173,215

Index