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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
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The Quotable Michael Harper "In the beginning I never found poems
in the American literary pantheon about the things I knew best. I
decided that I would at least do my part and try to put some of those
poems in there. At the time I was reading black American literature,
mostly in anthologies. I didn't know about Sterling Brown. If I had, I
would have taken a different approach..."
"In the 60s the critical thing in discovering the work of
people who had preceded me was going to the folk archives of the San
Francisco Library and listening to a recording of Sterling Brown and
Robert Hayden. Not only did I get a chance to follow that up by
reading their poems in books and anthologies, but I also heard their
voices. That transformed a lot of things for me. I realized there was
a musicality, a certain kind of artistic rigor that I hadn't heard
before." (Gulf Coast, p. 8, 9)
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In 1970,
Dear John, Dear Coltrane,
Harper's first collection of poems, was published by the
University of Pittsburgh Press. It had been a submission for the
University sponsored U.S. Poetry Prize. "Of the three
judges for the Pittsburgh Prize in 1969...[Gwendolyn] Brooks
liked my book enough to fight for it, and write me about
it...When Gwendolyn Brooks writes to you, and you've never met
her, praising your book, and fighting to see it published, it
gives you a boost in confidence." (Callaloo, p.
787)
The book would bring him national recognition when nominated
for the National Book Award. |
"Dear
John, Dear Coltrane
was a compilation of poems written over ten years: they were
struggles with maintaining a kind of hold on discipline and on
one's stylistic controls with voice, with idiom, with line, with
imagery, with the consistency of diction...The title poem is a
eulogy for a musician I loved greatly." (Arts in
Society, p. 470).
At about the time that
History went to press, Harper came to
Brown University as Associate Professor of English. "My first
year in residence was 1971; I had had a year's leave in Illinois,
written another book, been nominated for several awards, taken my
family to Ireland to see the landscape of Yeats. My honors seminar in
Yeats was taught with the intensity of the elect and the evangelical.
We lived off Highway 44 in North Dighton, Massachusetts, on sixteen
acres in a 200-year-old house; it looked like Uncle Tom's Cabin. There
were cranberries. The neighbors kept their distance. We waited for the
birth of our daughter while I taught classes and wrote..." (Brown
Alumni Monthly '83, p 48).
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Nightmare Begins Responsibility was
published in 1975. It not only contains several sections of
poems relating to his family, but also a wonderful section
dedicated to Howard University Professor Emeritus Sterling A.
Brown. Brown was Harper's inspiration, mentor, and friend.
"Sterling always accused me of getting him out of his
rocking chair when he was quite content to stay there..." (Callaloo,
p. 797)
"I began to think about [the anthology that became
Chant of Saints] in 1975 with the 50th anniversary of Survey
Graphic, the magazine that became The New Negro.
[Co-editor Robert Stepto and I] agreed that Sterling [A. Brown]
was a seminal figure, a pioneer in black literature; certainly
his
Negro Caravan is a classic. Stepto culled
Sterling's poems and came up with our title,
Chant of Saints." (Callaloo,
p. 797-99) |
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In 1979, Brown University sponsored a "Ralph
Ellison Festival" celebrating the work of the author of Invisible
Man, Shadow and Act and other works. "Ellison
showed me that the artistic process is, in part, intellectual,
that it conditions the process of the mind...He taught me to
have courage in my own insights, and in the sacredness of
technique." (Ploughshares, p. 20-21)
"Inman Page...was the first black graduate of Brown
[Class of 1877]. |
And he was the principal of the school
that Ralph Ellison went to as a kid - Frederick Douglass High School
in Oklahoma ... That was how we got Ellison to come to Brown, his
allegiance to Inman Page and to Page's daughter, Zellia Brogue, who
taught Ellison harmony...in high school." (Forum, p.
449) As part of the festival, Ellison was presented with a watercolor
study of his mentor by the artist, Richard Yarde.
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1983 brought Harper the academic recognition
earned with more than 20 years of teaching: he was appointed the
Israel
J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University.
Interviewed at the time, Harper said the chair "brings a
greater responsibility on my part to be a good teacher because
Kappy was a great teacher. And I have a greater responsibility
to remain an artist and to use the time that I have well and to
nourish myself to keep the creative juices flowing.
In the 1990s Harper was the recipient of many awards,
including an honorary degree from Notre Dame College. |
He was also awarded a Doctor of
Humane Letters from Coe College. The Coe College events later made up
a special section of the 1991 issue of Callaloo: A Journal of
African-American and African Arts and Letters. It includes a
series of essays by Harper's friends and former students, each of whom
remembered him in special (if telling) ways:
From Robert Stepto: "When I think of Michael the teacher, I
think of phrases like, 'where is the bibliography?' or. 'Where are the
pages?' or, 'Ok, you got stuck; on what page did you get
stuck?'...the follow-up line goes like this: 'Oh, I see; you got stuck
on page two. Let me see page two. Oh, you don't have it. You
threw it away. Well, let me see page one, your first paragraph. You
don't have that? Let me see now: you had an assignment; it is not
done; you got stuck on page two; you don't have page two or even page
one. I think we're going to have to call your Mama. Let me have the
number - or have you lost that, too?'" (p. 803)
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From Anthony Walton: "I'll never
forget my first serious talk with him. He stared at me with his
Crazy Horse on a bad day glare...and said, matter-of-factly,
'Boy, I'm gonna teach you things you ain't gonna understand for
10 or 20 years.' During that session he also demolished my most
accomplished and favorite poem to that point; asked me in a
cryptic and menacing way if I knew anything about the Civil War;
told me that he thought I had it in me to write a good book
someday but that it was up to me, not him; waved me out the door
with a brusque, 'Go on. Boy, you gonna spoil my lunch.'"
(p. 808) |
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In 1994, Michael Harper and co-editor Anthony
Walton published
Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep: An Anthology of African
American Poetry Since 1945. [The anthology]
"is dedicated to the achievement of Sterling A. Brown, as a
poet and folksayist, scholar-teacher, and pioneering wordsmith
in a dynamic American lexicon, especially the laconic
meditations and metaphysics extant in folkspeech as the
underbelly of the nation's lexicon."
"I am connected to Coltrane, to Charlie Parker, to
Billie Holliday, to Bessie Smith, to Duke Ellington, Louis
Armstrong and to all the master musicians who operate in our
tradition, to expand it, carry it on, refine it, enliven it, and
make it consistent with the aspirations, the human aspirations,
of the people in the particular context in which they live,
where the music is a vibrant kind of exponential factor directed
toward their desires, toward their dreams, their visions of
themselves as irreducible spirits." (Arts in Society,
p. 469) |
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updated 19 June 2008
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