Books by Jerry W. Ward  Jr.

Trouble the Water (1997) / Black Southern Voices (1992)

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Review, Introduction, Table of Contents

Trouble the Water: 250 years of African-American Poetry

Edited by Jerry W. Ward, Jr

The haunting refrain of the anonymous spiritual "Were You Dere?" the classic rhymes of Frances Ellen Watkin's Harper's "Bury Me in a Free Land," the jazz beat of Maya Angelou's "Times-Square-Shoeshine-Composition," and the exquisite balance of Etheridge Knight's haikus—the entire rich and varied tradition of African-American poetry appears in this superb anthology, unified throughout by the authenticity of experiences wrung straight from the soul.

Trouble the Water, the first collection to cover close to 300 years of poetic achievement in 400 important works African American Writers, features women as half the contributors and includes nearly 50 poems from the 1980s and 1990s. It bears witness to the beautiful and compelling contribution of African-American poetry to American literature. The familiar verses of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Robert Haydn, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Nikki Giovanni are part of a national treasure, and the exciting poems of writers such as Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Michael S. Harper, and Pulitzer prizewinner Rita Dove. Let us hear a new generation ringing out the cadence of a great heritage once more

.—Backcover of book

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INTRODUCTION

Like the origins of poetry throughout the world, the beginnings of African-American poetry are in speech and song. This fact is of no small consequence. Primacy of the oral and the aural forces us to be active in imagining just how it is that peoples displaced from one part of the world and reassembled in another created a distinctive body of poetry. What is primal about its origins and strongly marked in its continuity as a tradition suggests the value of listening to the poetry as carefully as we read it silently. Listen. The beginning of African-American poetry is the sound of Africans in the complex process of becoming Americans. Those historical moments of transformation are inflected with resistance, the trauma of loss, adaptation, cross-fertilizing, and synthesis.

An African-American poetics emerges from the détente of African languages and cultures with themselves first, and then with encountered European languages and cultures. The initial New World points of becoming (which includes the Afro-Asiatic) remain in deep waters beyond salvage. Nevertheless, the links of African-American poetry to its mixed ancestry recurs in black American oral traditions, in the early inscription of Lucy Terry, Jupiter Hamon, Phillis Wheatley, and George Moses Horton; it is to be heard in the sorrow songs, sacred music, blues, and jazz, the penchant for return to African sources, among some early and late twentieth-century poets. 

You hear the ancient links in rap’s musical levels. As Eugene Redmond reminds us in Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976) we obviously do not know the precise time “when the first African sounds or movements were incorporated into ‘white’ or Western frames of reference or vice versa; but we do know that it did happen.”

Trouble the Water pays tribute to the creative genius of black folk who have made a tradition of sound and uncommon sense. This anthology honors their insisting that music and speech be fused into a poetry for exploring, coming to know, creating delight and instruction, praising and criticizing, remembering and transforming, and meeting, in the early years of this century, and odd demand: proof of civilization. African-American poetry moves into the new public spheres of the twenty-first century. It absorbs the pre-future of now. It is worthwhile to rediscover how it evolved. It is obligatory to remember it comes from a tradition that, in the words of Margaret Walker, has “remained singularly faithful to the living truth of the human spirit.”  

This book is indebted to The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 [1949], edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps and to Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets (1971), models for a difficult enterprise. These collections sought to provide a comprehensive survey of African-American poetic expression. It is easy to survey. It is hard to be comprehensive. Anthologies will not accommodate everything worthy of inclusion, and the fact that no survey of more than two hundred and fifty years of poetry can be definitive is one an editor must accept. 

Recent anthologies which focus mainly on twentieth-century work—most notably Kevin Powell and Ras Baraka’s In the Tradition (1992), Michael Harper and Anthony Walton’s Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep (1994) and Clarence Major’s The Garden Thrives (1996)—illustrate how the body of poetry that should be read grows larger by the decade. 

There will always be gaps in representation. Why poet X not included? Why were poems k, l, and m not reprinted? Well, the permission fee for work by poet X far exceeded the editor’s modest budget. Perhaps poems k, l, and m had been frequently anthologized, and the space was assigned to less well-known poets and poems. At best, the editor can only hope an anthology provides work that has both historical importance and aesthetic appeal, that an anthology succeeds in being a useful resources for the study of literature and culture.

In compiling Trouble the Water, I was strongly aware that disputes about how to read, how to read a poem, and how to theorize about literary works as features of cultures trouble the contests to open or close the American mind. Moreover, I wanted the collection to be useful to a broad audience: general readers, younger readers who still have the capacity to experience the magic of language, and students and teachers not yet initiated into the priestly prejudices of the academy.

It was very important to consider that in the second edition of The Poetry of the Negro (1970), Arna Bontemps has suggested the poems of the 1960s should be the answers to questions about the “thoughts and feelings of an aroused folk in a time of trouble.” Bontemps was hinting the kind of poetry he and Hughes had included in the first edition was within “the literary traditions of the language that it employs.” Poetic works marked by a strong racial idiom (folk seculars, spirituals, blues) were considered outside those literary traditions and were excluded.

For Dudley Randall, on the other hand, poetry that might awaken readers from aesthetic tranquility was very much inside the African-American and American literary traditions. He included such work in The Black Poets. Trouble the Water is conceptually closer to Randall’s design than Bontemps’. Before one canonizes on the literary/extraliterary axis, it seems desirable to represent the variety and difference that actually does exit. Otherwise, one makes trivial the possibility that variety is a crucial feature of our national literature, or that poets at various times address their works to diverse implied audiences.

The manner in which time has been used in structuring this anthology deserves a brief comment. Many anthologies of African-American literature have used such normative categories as eighteenth-century beginnings, the struggle against slavery, the rise of the New Negro, the Harlem Renaissance, the protest years, the Black Arts Movement, and the postmodern to suggest turning points in the growth of literature. This procedure is quite legitimate. It establishes paradigms for the study of literature. But poets are subversive. They may or may not write works that conform to the dominant ideas of a period. Their works may defy convenient periodicity.

To encourage richer creative and critical responses to the making of the African-American poetic tradition, I have organized the works to emphasize fruitful tensions between poets and history or between individual talents and a narrative always awaiting revisions. Within each section, care has been taken to organize the poems according to the birth dates of the poets. Since poets do not always write or publish in their early years, in a few instances, poets who came to public notice later in life may be distanced from their contemporaries. This should remind us that many poets are productive over years that span the divisions. It was tempting to want to organize all the poems by publication dates, but so radical a move would have created unnecessary confusions.

Part I (“Oral Poetry/Slave creations”) marks off a time when works were most often anonymous, when the texts chosen can only represent the “spirit” of a time prior to their being recorded. Part II (“Voices Before Freedom, 1746–1865”) draws attention to the poets as enslaved people or free people of color, the acceptance of prevailing modes of writing poetry or some effort to be innovative within accepted forms. The past does impinge upon the present.

Readers should bring forward the poetry in Part I for comparison with the self-consciously formal works that yearn for emancipation in Part II. Part III (“Voices of Reconstruction, 1865–1910”) emphasizes the poetic voice as a bridge between the late nineteenth-century obligation to deal with an immediate slave past in the same moment it wishes to address the promises of a twentieth-century future. The problem of finding the “right” language for poetry complements DuBois’s famed “problem of the color line.” It is most poignantly “represented” in the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar and finds temporary resolution in the work of James Weldon Johnson.

The voices in Part IV (“The Early Twentieth Century, 1910–1960”) begin with Johnson, whose magisterial introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1921) still deserves study for what it says about poetic language and emotion, turn of thought, and the demands of conventions. Johnson set forth the possibility of creating new forms “which will still hold the racial flavor.” The poetic forms that embody the intellectual, artistic, and social concerns of African Americans up to the turbulent 1960s are stunning in magnitude, variety, and quality.

William Stanley Braithwaite and Countee Cullen use language to register ambivalence about the “rightness” of modernist experimentation. Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Melvin B. Tolson, and especially Langston Hughes experiment daringly; indeed, Hughes’s use of blues and jazz to inform poetic sites of memory is prototypical for the later activity of Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, and the Beat poets. Anne Spenser, Arna Bontemps, Mary Miller, and Naomi Long Madgett revitalize the expressive potential of lyric. Sterling Brown, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Hayden demonstrate that modernist poetic techniques as well as respect for folk heritage and history are essential in creating art from the raw complexities of African-American life.

The penultimate section, Part V (“Voices for a New Age”) begins with the voice of Elma Stuckey, whom E. D. Hirsch noted is one of “the authentic American poets of our century.” Her poetry is resonant with concern for history, orality, and the subtle recrafting that enable us, according to Stephen E. Henderson, to “hear the voices of the people who created the spirituals and blues.” The section ends with the recycling voice of Charlie Braxton, who celebrates the necessity o “iambic & trochaic pentameter” to evoke anguish and beauty for those

We circle back to the poetic work of oral creation, back to Toomer’s observation that “one seed becomes/An everlasting song” for the new age and its new voices. Within the historicizing frame of Stuckey and Braxton are the disruptive affirmations of Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, Ishmael Reed, Sarah Webster Fabio, Haki Madhubuti, and other pioneers of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic revolution in African-American poetic tradition. Aesthetic revolution in African-American poetic tradition.

Here also is the tradition-conserving work of Mari Evans, Lance Jeffers, Eugene Redmond, Kenneth McClane, Quincy Troupe, Lucille Clifton, Kalamu ya Salaam, Henry Dumas, Carolyn Rodgers, and Sterling D. Plumpp; the distinguished omni-American artistry of Ntozake Shange, Michael Harper, Wanda Coleman, Rita Dove, Harryette Mullen, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Trouble the Water seeks to represent poetic voices moving across the categories and boundaries of more than two centuries, calling and responding both in the private spaces of racialized imperative and in the public spaces of the human necessity we call art.

As the narrator of Invisible Man reminds us, history is neither a horizontal nor a vertical line. It is a boomerang. This metaphor has its own invisibility in the continuing evolution of African-American poetry. Giving a judicious hearing to the sounds and formal achievements of the tradition requires being prepared for the boomerang’s return. Trouble the Water is a sampling of poems (texts) that can be examined for what they reveal about the multiple, necessary, and highly valued functions of African-American art in cultural histories. 

For those who would continue to ask the tautologous question “IS THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN POEM A WORK OF ART OR A WORK OF EVIDENCE?,” Trouble the Water is the answer. And for helping me to put it in your hands, I am very grateful to Lawrence Jordan, Rosemary Ahern, Kari Paschall, and Kenny Fountain.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Memphis, Tennessee

August 20, 1996

Ward, Jr., Jerry W., editor. Trouble the Water.  New York: Penguin Group. February, 1997.

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Review

Dr. Ward's book is the best in its class since Langston Hughes' and Arna Bontemps' THE POETRY OF THE NEGRO. The volume is a must for every high school and college in the country. This book is so beautifully organized that it becomes more than a cronology of African American poetry, but a history of Blacks in the United States through poetry. Dr. Ward has left no one out who deserves to be heard, and has wisely included several brilliant, often neglected, Southern poets. If the publishers of this book realize what a goldmind it is, they would see to it that it is placed in every school and library in the country must for every high school and college, January 19, 1998.

— Chakula

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CONTENTS