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Books by Michael Harper
Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems /
Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep: An Anthology of African American
Poetry Since 1945
The Vintage Book of African American Poetry /
The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown /
Images of Kin
Dear John, Dear Coltrane /
Debridement /
Honorable Amendments /
Chant of Saints /
Healing Song for the Inner Ear /
Hear Where Coltrane Is Cassette /
History Is Your Own Heartbeat /
Nightmare Begins Responsibility /
Rhode Island: Eight Poems
Selected Poems /
Song: I Want a Witness /
Photographs: Negatives: History as Apple Tree
* * * * * Michael S. Harper
Poet Scholar, University Professor
Michael
S. Harper—born in
Brooklyn, New York, to Walter Warren Harper, a postal worker,
and Katherine Johnson Harper, a medical stenographer—earned a
B.A. and M.A. from what is now known as California State University, and
an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. In 1951, his family moved
to a predominantly white Los Angeles neighborhood filled with
racial tension which was traumatic enough to "make" him a
poet. The extensive record collection of his family would eventually
profoundly affect Harper's poetry. Though in high school Harper wrote a
few poems, he had not yet considered writing as a career option.
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In 1955, Harper enrolled at Los
Angeles City College, and then Los Angeles State College, which he
attended until 1961, during which time he was also employed as a
postal worker. He says that his life began here. The experiences
of other postal workers, which they shared freely, and his own
experience of segregated housing at the Iowa Writer's Workshop
formed the foundation of Harper’s assessment of America as a
schizophrenic society. Nonetheless, Harper credits his years at
Los Angeles State, where he read John Keats's letters and Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man, for preparing him for the Iowa
Writer’s Workshop, which he began in 1961. After a year there, Harper taught at various
schools, including Pasadena City College (1962), Contra Costa College
(1964-1968), and California State College (now University, 1968-1969). |
While at Iowa, the only black student in both his
poetry and fiction classes, Harper lived in segregated housing,
which influenced his thinking and further demonstrated the
schizophrenia of American society, a mode of thinking that separates and
opposes, contrary to what Harper sees as a holistic universe where
humanity is a reflection of the universe, and the universe is a
reflection of humanity. This philosophical perspective served as a basis
for Harper's aesthetics themes and strategies, which include music,
kinship, history, and mythology.
For Harper, history and mythology are related.
The mythologies of white supremacy, for instance, is marred by the
history it engenders, rigidly encasing humanity in static
categories. Harper's writings manipulate old European and American myths
and create new ones. His first poetry volume was
Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970). For Harper, Coltrane,
whom Harper knew, is both the man and his jazz. Harper included the
music of poetry as a means to affirm and articulate suffering in black
life and culture, to gain from it and survive it.
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Here, as in Harper's later volumes,
the rhythms of black music replaces the metrics of
traditional English without sacrificing craft. Coltrane
becomes the link. Harper devotes a section of the volume
to poems about his own kin; his family become
continuities of humanity, linking personal and
collective history.
History Is Your Own Heartbeat (1971) won
for Harper the Poetry Award of the Black Academy of Arts and
Letters. This volume focuses on Harper's family, rather than
musicians.
Song: I Want a Witness (1972) uses the
religion of blacks as a subtext for its meditations on history,
while, in the second section, Harper dialogues with William
Faulkner’s short story "The Bear." With a further
emphasis on family, Harper published the limited edition
Photographs: Negatives: History as Apple Tree (1972).
In
Nightmare Begins Responsibility (1975), Harper continued
his variations on kinship, history, the wholistic universe, and an
individual's responsibility. |
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Song: I Want a Witness and
Debridement (1973) had dealt
with the same material as his 1975 volume and felt by some to be
Harper’s richest volume. Here Harper used poems to address kinship in
a jazz-blues idiom; and as a means of dealing with the death of his
friend Ralph Albert Dickey.
Images of Kin (1977) won Harper the
Melville-Cane Award and a nomination for the 1978 National Book Award.
Three other volumes,
Rhode Island: Eight Poems (1981), Healing
Song for the Inner Ear (1985), and a limited edition entitled Songlines:
Mosaics (1991) have also been published.
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As a poet, scholar, and teacher, Harper's
reputation by the mid 1970s was firmly established. He
won a number of other award, including the National Institute of
Arts and Letters Creative Writing Award (1972), a Guggenheim
fellowship (1976), and a National Endowment for the Arts grant
(1977), and an American specialist grant in 1977, which
allow him trave to Ghana, South Africa, Zaire, Senegal, Gambia,
Botswana, Zambia, and Tanzania. Such overseas adventures
influenced his thinking and writing. Writers Gayl Jones, Melvin
Dixon, and Anthony Walton were Harper students. Harper edited
The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (1980);
he is co-editor with Anthony Walton of
The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (2000) and
Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep: An Anthology of African American Poetry
Since 1945 (1994), and with
Robert B. Stepto of
Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American
Literature, Art, and Scholarship (1979). |
He was the first Poet
Laureate of the State of Rhode Island (1988-1993) and has received many
other honors, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and
a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award. Michael S.
Harper is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown
University, where he has taught since 1970. He lives in Barrington,
Rhode Island.
Presently, Michael S. Harper, is a Brown University Professor of
19th- and 20th-Century British and American Poetry; Poetry Theory;
African-American Literature; African Literature; Yeats, Ralph Ellison,
Robert Hayden and Sterling A. Brown.
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Black World
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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updated 19 June 2008
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