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"POETRY OF PROTEST"
by Mark C. Kennedy, 1952. Poetry is human behavior that floods out of consciousness, to transform or to keep intact the world which consciousness defines. Some people write it. Others live it. Still others try to renounce it. But it is always with us, for to deny it is to deny ourselves. Consciousness--yours and mine--is bound to change, in part because we age in experience, and in part because the world about us is changing. Poetry ranges widely because the human condition ranges widely. It has many highly varied and subtle moods. Some is somber when we are somber, joyous when we are joyous, despondent, painful when we are in pain. Indeed, we can have no mood which cannot be found expressed in poetry. Or, it may seem to have no mood at all-appearing dry as dust, as if it were lived and expressed by a very old man, or at least by one who had never been young. Milton's poetry struck me this way. But it came to say to me something which could not be said, except as it was said, and so I like it. I did not like it when I was very young. I was not ready for it then. There is no great mystery about poetry. It begins where you are living, and it will be part of you until you pass on. It is a great river which passes through us all. It is a river called life in which we the living find create, share and pass on the meanings of life. It is an expression of the human condition--your condition, my condition. It is for this reason that I do not want to tell about the many different kinds of poetry. I would rather have you understand their essential sameness. Yet, it is not enough to say that poetry is human behavior that floods out of consciousness to alter or to keep the same the world which consciousness defines. Because the world which our consciousness defines is the only world we know and respond to. But in responding to it, we all have a part in changing the world, and at the same time changing the make-up of our view of it. Thus, our poetry changes. Our image of self changes, and how we express ourselves in our behavior changes. Such changes are also poetic. Poetry then, expresses that symbolic linkage between human beings, you and me and the people around about us. It is, in this sense, the living link between us and the world we inhabit. Each poem expresses a particular relation of people (not merely the poet himself to a conception, an image of the enveloping world. It may be an image of a Godless world, a Diviner world, a loathsome and ugly world, a world full of machines that stamp out individual worth. It may be the image of a serene world of love, a world of bees and flowers and sunsets; or it may be the image of a turbulent, painful world, a world of shame and confession, or one full of flux, conflict and war. Poetry all of it--expresses thought-feelings about one's place in the sun--one's location in the general or purely local scheme of things. But it also expresses the self-conception of both the poet and the person who read or sings his poem with sympathy. But even for the unsympathetic reader, a poem may sharpen all the more his contrary self-image. There is tragedy here, and this is poetic too. Poetry may express either appreciation of something, and a longing for something. Appreciation and longing are often accompanied by a negation of something we daily experience--a desire to abolish or to escape it. Thus, in one expression we feel a longing, a nostalgia, for the past. In another we experience a longing for something new, something meaningful, grand and different. Or, it may express satisfaction with things as they are. Often, the object of desire is not to be had on earth, but only in the image, the unshakable belief in Heaven. Or, the longing may be simply a yearning for death and for nothing else beyond death. A poetic expression is very often at the same time an ironic or satirical criticism of the human condition. Criticism and prophecy are very close cousins. But satire and irony may vanish and assume a straight-forward condemnation and assume the grim proportions of a threat and a forceful transformation of the human condition, Poetic expression may range from universalistic to class-bound verses, but it always tells us something (by symbols, images, and metaphors)--and that something is the relation of the poet (and those who understand him) to the universe as seen or defined in the consciousness of the poet. And the poet is yourself and myself and how our behavior floods out of consciousness in the poetic torrent of our lives. Protest poetry expresses the link between the personal troubles of human beings and the burdens imposed upon human beings by the demands and the sanctions of society. It makes these personal troubles into public issues--and it functions, though at times not effectively, to alter or to transform those institutions of society which have become deaf to the misery they crate in their demands and punishments. Protest poetry, together with all other kinds, then, stands as a symbolic record showing where biography and social structure touch each other to create history. Protest poetry differs from romantic poetry of course, because romantic poetry is far away. It is not the poetry of the near at hand. It tells us that the world is too much with and that we ought to go back to nature, to the woods or to the mountains and perhaps to live alone in some forever-green meadow with skylarks, with a loaf of brad, and a jug of wine where hopefully we would chance upon a sweet, fair, virginal flowing -haired princess--or, some Galahad pure-of-heart in shining armor. Romantic poetry is far away because it withdraws from the here and now, because it projects beyond it to a fairyland existence. It speaks of skylarks, fields of clover, sunsets. But it never mentions flies, maggots, cockroaches, malnutrition, or death. It is a substitute for the dream of and yearning for Heaven. The dream involves no yearning for death but for eternal life in an earthly paradise. It is just here where romantic poetry differs from spiritual poetry. They differ in the objects longed for. They also differ in another way. Beneath the surface of the spiritual--this yearning for a soft slipping away from toil to eternal life in Heaven--lies a protest expressed as a bill of complaints, a deep, a profound agony in earthly burdens. This protest now and again shows through ironic or satirical criticism of the human causes of oppression. This is near at hand, and it is not present in romantic poetry. It is agony that manifests spiritualism. It is leisure and boredom that manifests romantic poetry. These are two different kinds of consciousness, and they are reflect two different kinds of life-styles. In my mind, romantic poets were a bunch of sissies. They had never taken hold of life. They did not know its feel. They wanted to. They tried to in their poems. They thought it had to do with getting back to nature, but for all their yearning they never got there. They could not give up their leisure. They didn't want to agonize. They did not have to. Because of this, they never seemed to know the dreadful meaning of rain during haying time before the hay was in the barn. They didn't know how a farmer felt when he looked at a corn-crib full of corn. They had not experienced the pure joy of fatigue in that soft time of day when work is done. They had never been kicked, lashed, bought or sold on the auction blocks of misery. They had never seen their loved ones lynched. They were too far away. I was a farm boy, moved to a small town. Shelley was set before me in high school. Other romantic poets were presented also. Odes to skylarks nauseated me. Eulogies to creatures of nature appeared so fraudulent, a waste of time. What good were skylarks to the poor? Who could go about bird watching all the time? Farmers' wives paid attention to birds, sometimes, but their husbands attended to milking, spreading manure on the meadow, hoeing corn. They were already close to nature. They did not have to get back to it. Work and leisure were spaced by this position of the sun in the sky. A sojourn at Walden was not the way to get back to nature. In trying to get back, romantic poets got farther away. In getting farther away, they never knew the feel of plough handles as the share cut a furrow straight and true. They never knew the meaning of the long, straight furrow. They still don't. By contrast, the poetry of Sandburg was closer at hand. He wrote about Chicago as the city that "rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work". I liked Sandburg once. But once I got the feel of cities, Sandburg's poetry seemed farther away. He saw what he wanted to, and he saw no more. He didn't see the iron heel Jack London saw. The life of Martin Eden would have been meaningless to him. His eyes were not the eyes of Dos Pasos, not the eyes of Orwell. He didn't know the feel of being down and cut in London and Paris. He had not seen How The Other Half Lives which Jacob Riis so vividly described in the latter part of the 19th century. He had never taken a wild side walk with some early Algren to experience the life of The Man With The Golden Arm. The material had been there for a very long time, but Sandburg ignored it. He was near, but not near enough to witness what Miller wrote about in Death of A Salesman. There is no sharp line between the romantic and the near at hand. The contrasts are sharp only between the ends of the spectrum. Take for example the image of an evening as the sun is setting on the Sahara, and a man is standing on the Muquattam Heights looking beyond the crimson and yellow Nile to that absolutely breathless moment of blazing, swirling colors before that rage of beauty finally darkens the far horizon and the red sands of evening into the shades of night. Suppose that night this experience floods out of him, mingled with all his passion, and that in his poem he depicts all of life this way--that all of life should be the life of that moment. Then, the whole of his poetry is far away, because the image he valued is momentary--a single facet of infinite existence. We cannot always endure what is close by. It is too often intolerable. On another day that whole of life is and must be lived, then that poetry is also momentary. It is close at hand, but it too is but a facet of infinite existence. But it is the poet who always sees the desert from far away, who always sees only how it looks from a comfortable distance, who has never been staggered by its blistering heat--it is that poet who is romantic. On the other hand, if a poet always depicts the desert as something of agony, then, though he is not a romantic, he is, I think, as existentialist. It is in this that we can see two kinds of mystiques, the romantic and the existential. Existentialism deals no more with life as it is than does romanticism. Both are distortions, but in opposite directions. The professional existentialist, like the romantic, is 'successful'. The difference is that the former identifies with squalor, agony and suffering. He always presents himself as if he really had worn forever a shirt of hair. And this is the way he presents mankind and the whole of history. Everyone, through all time, we're told, must identify with Sisyphus--even though it's the boulder of Sisyphus that gets the free ride. Existential agony is agony without protest, agony without irony, agony without pathos--it is pure agony, an agony that revels in agony. If it is tragedy, it is tragedy beyond tears, beyond laughter. It is in fact agony that no one has ever experienced. At least no existentialist has. Existentialists do not try to get back to nature, they believe that they are already there. This too, is a peculiar kind of consciousness--depending as it does on a life-style that only professional romantics can afford. There are throughout the world, however, millions of people whose agony is genuine, whose agony is manifest in protest. Historically considered, its poetic manifestations ranges from the spiritual to the visceral, from the intellectual acids of ironic end satirical criticism, to straight foreward condemnations of the conditions of agony. This is the agony that has endured for many people for centuries, and its poetic outcry over those centuries is the history of the changing consciousness of agony unremitted by change. This poetry is close by, and I call it the poetry of agony and protest. It does not embrace its agony. It wishes either to escape it or to abolish its conditions. It does not identify with agony as the everlasting plight of man. For that is the calling of the professional existentialist. In protest poetry we see what is loved and hated, what is valued and loathed. We see in the blistering qualities of loathing all the hues of yearning for the qualities of love and deliverance. We see all man's visions of salvation, all his fears and tremblings, his anguish and his hunger, his boldness and his quaverings as he stands accused, before the hood of authority, of the crime of being human. Protest poetry is always political in character. It has to do with authority and what authority would make us do (would make us suffer to do) what it would take from us in the doing of it, and what it returns to us in the form of punishments and penal sanctions. It begins very early in life, and for those who never escape the heavy burdens it imposes, it lasts a lifetime. It may last for centuries. It has lasted this long for Black Americans. It has lasted this long in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Latin America. It lasts this long wherever the history of subjugation, following warfare or enslavement, lasts this long. I will focus upon its manifestations in the United States; and throughout the rest of this work, I will try to identify the types and turning points of the consciousness which the poetry of agony expresses. If I err it will be because I am too faraway. Those who are closer by will know it well enough. Whatever the outcome, I undertake this task if only to understand, to catch a glimpse of, the destiny awaiting us and to mirror it back upon an authoritarian world as an omen of its own fate. Through the heart of America cuts a very long river with a very long history. From north to south it traverses the whole journey from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico where it dumps the polluted after birth of labor which it received along the way. At one end of it is heavy industry behemoth corporations, and gigantic sprawling cities. At the other end huge cities are tied to agriculture, to cotton and petroleum, light industry, and the import--export trade. For Black American this river connects two kinds of bondage; but it keeps rolling along unmindful of its function. Several hundred miles before it passes New Orleans, it passes a point where three States, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi meet at the bluffs. At these bluffs rose Memphis, Tennessee. Here and elsewhere along the Mississippi, the poetry of agony was generated to produce several successively different forms of consciousness-revealing themselves in the poetry of protest as this poetry becomes manifest in the movements of Black Americans from South to North, as it becomes manifest in the institutional changes of society in the trust and thirst of industrial capitalism, and as Black Americans came to realize that despite movement, despite industrial transformation, agony does not dissipate but merely changes form, content and character. How different was consciousness in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the 20th century when that very wise man, W.C. Handy, of Memphis--whose life and poetry stretched from Beale Street though out the Western world. In his song of Beale Street, "The Beale Street Blues", all traces of the early consciousness are gone, for on Beale Street, Handy observed, "there are enough golden balls to pave the New Jerusalem." These clusters of three golden balls are still a common symbol on Beale Street. Hung above doors of Beale Street's pawn shops, they still remind the destitute of what separates them from the rest of humanity, and they still delineate the boundaries which circumscribe and define the conditions of Black misery. They tell the impoverished that if they can acquire any valuables at all, they can unload them there for a microscopic portion of their worth, without being asked how the merchandise was acquired. These golden balls symbolize that critical point between the very poor who are in this and other ways kept in debt and the patty merchants of Beale Street who make their living at these agonized intersections between oppression and liberation. And where does all the unclaimed merchandise of miser which passes under these golden balls go? It was this question which I asked myself back in the late 1950's. It is resold of course, but the story does not end there. These petty merchants of Beale, I observed, often pooled monies obtained in this way in order to buy up, from the major department stores of Memphis and elsewhere, all the unsold merchandise which had gone out of fashion--merchandise perhaps two or three years old--and which could no longer be sold on the white markets of Main Street north of Beale. Where Beale Street cut across Main as it proceeds toward the river, it divides Main Street into two socio-economically different sections, South of Beale on Main are many credit clothier shops, and while the names of theses shops remain unchanged, they change proprietorships as often as twice a year. It is in these shops where all this outmoded merchandise is dumped for rapid sale to Blacks who can afford the 'marked down' prices. For those who cannot afford an outright purchase, 'liberal' terms of credit are 'extended'. A range of a dozen different forms of dunning letters--from "perhaps it has slipped your mind to pay us this month " to "we have advised our attorney and our employer of your refusal to pay and have taken steps to garnishes your wages", lie behind the 'liberal' credit terms involved in the movement of this merchandise. Before these sales begin, they are well advertised not only on the windows of these shops, but also in the two Black Press, in the two main papers of Memphis, The Commercial Appeal, and The Press Scimitar, and over all the local radio stations. On the opening day of the sale, back in the late fifties at least, free hot-dogs would be given out at the door of these shops, accompanied by the laud blare of Jazz or Dixieland music issuing from two large loud speakers over the shop door. Thankfully for the ear drums, these sales took place one at a time. I have personal knowledge that in the weeks in which these sales went on, as much as $600.00 per day in gross cash changed hands. I have no idea what the gross credit profit amounted too. Where then does this accumulated misery go from there? The net proceeds are of course invested in various enterprises and securities. But they have been the principal means by which the petty merchants of Beale Street have managed to acquire sufficient wealth to leave their Beale Street pawn shop days far behind them, as they go up the social ladder to settle themselves in business on a grander scale on main Street north of Beale. Investments in shoe stores in chain laundries, in medium to large Department stores, in five and dime, or dollar chain stores--these investments represent where at least part of the merchandise of misery goes. Several generations of petty merchants have converted in this way to a different societal establishment which pivots on their 'off-Beale' holdings on Main north of Beale and elsewhere. Quiet respectability, amid posh circumstances, affords sufficient leisure to take an active interest in 'civic matters', and it has become quite common for persons a generation or two removed from Beale Street brokerage days to become 'members of the board', asking policies to 'guide' some three to for dozen different welfare agencies in Memphis. Front Street, which parallels Main and runs along the River, means cotton and cotton exchange. It represents now only one of the sources of livelihood for Blacks in Memphis. It symbolizes a class which made its money on Cotton in this tri-state area, and which went into banking, securities, and insurance. Today, it has come to symbolize a declining cotton culture, and it has, among its shops, proprietorships which are owned by the newly rich, who did not make their money on cotton, but who made it in real estate and light industry. Members of the cotton culture have referred to this new monied class as 'that flat-boat culture' (those 'poor whites' who allegedly came down the Mississippi on flatboats when cotton was king). This is the ascendent class, along with there retail sales, department store class. It is a class which Handy had not known when he wrote 'The Beale Street Blues.' But in Handy's time, and also today, so many Blacks made small wages on Front Street to spend them on Beale where they also became indebted in the shadow of those golden balls, where they exchanged for debts whatever merchandise or goods they had obtained from employment on Front Street and elsewhere. And what was this indebted money, along with wages, spent for? It was spent for high rent, clothes, and food; it was also spent on very fundamental escapes. It was spent gambling. It was spent on whores, on muscatel, on fleeting drunken moments of escape. It was spent this way because liberation was not at hand. Out of this milieu in Memphis, and elsewhere along the river, there arose several poetic mediums--the Blues, the Stomps, the Joys, Jazz, and Dixieland. There is no clear-cut line between poetry and song. They intertwine to give the singers of both their sense of worth and being, and in the poetry of protest they create a way by which, said all the deprivation, the oppressed can go on loving, or hating humanity while suffering at the same time oppression's heavy, its absolutely staggering blows. Handy came up during the so-called progressive era in Memphis, it was then that Ed Crump--longtime political boss of Memphis--removed all the expressive outlets by which Blacks could displace their miseries, their fears, and their worries. He cracked down on prostitution, jailed women suspected of it, removed many of them from the city; he cracked down on petty gambling, street gambling, arrested hundreds of people of varied ages caught shooting craps. He closed up many saloons, jailed drunks and vagrants by the scores; and he did this in the name of morality. But he did not remove those golden balls. He did nothing to curb his own methods of selling auto insurance, nor did he do anything about curbing White gambling. He did not provide higher wages for Blacks, or provide more jobs for them. He did nothing at all about the conditions of their oppression or to give them the opportunities to escape it. He made local welfare and housing agencies a political dumping ground for those Whites who had helped in his campaigns to win the mayoralty; and his singular accomplishment, aside from becoming extremely wealthier, was to 'dry up' or clap shut the places where misery finds temporary relief. About the causes of all this, he did nothing. Handy observed all this and summarized it in the following lines: Goin' don 't the river, Today, one hears no music on Beale Street. It has nothing comparable any more to New Orleans' French Quarter, and certainly it has nothing comparable to the Eureka Brass BAnd. Handy wrote the epitaph of Beale Street, but earlier he had seen its coming demise, for when Ed Crump first ran for the office of Mayor of Memphis, W. C. Handy with his little band of musicians appeared on the corner of Main and Madison to play and song for the first time the now little known ballad called "Mr. Crump". In this song, Handy, in the phrase 'easy rider' summarized all that was spontaneous on Beale Street. This song also bears witness to Crump's political ambitions which had to do with promises to represent the cause of Blacks--while at the same time not hesitating to purchase votes, prudently, from Blacks to assure a spectacular victory at the polls. Mr. Crump Ironically, the effect of this poem on the cotton culture was exactly the opposite of its intent; it had exactly the opposite of its intent; it had exactly the opposite of its effect on the attitudes of Black Americans of the so-called 'Progressive Era' in Memphis. For Crump turned "Mr. Crump" into his campaign song. In the late 1950's the elite of Memphis cleaned up a small area on Beale Street. It was the size of a very small parking lot, and they constructed on it an over-sized, red brick pair of adjoining public toilets. Adjacent to this structure they erected a bronze statue of W. C. Handy, and they advertised all this as 'Handy Park'. It was well advertised in the local press before its dedication and the unveiling. I was present at these 'ceremonies'. The White folks were there, but the Blacks were not to be found, except for the negligible few who felt constrained to be there. Handy's poetic life marked a turning point in the consciousness of Black agony. From then on, the poetry of protest would take a different character and a different meaning--an active meaning, and increasingly it would single out the objects of protest. Its cutting irony would bite deeper into the sensibilities of outrage and hatred It would do more than satirize. It would condemn and issue a call to rally and fight. It would disavow the White man's label of 'Negro' as it had earlier disavowed the term 'nigger' and nigra', and it would orient itself around the fact that Black is beautiful. New symbols, and a new leadership would express it. It would range from the visceral to the intellectual acids which it would challenge and erode the older kinds of consciousness which had to do with a White Christ, a male Christ, with lily White Christianity, and with democracy through upward mobility and integration. Finding the proper words for protest poetry appearing long before Handy's time is difficult. But as I see it, it was 'soulful', mournful; it expressed the heaviness of one's earthly burden, the pain and suffering of the life of slavery and servitude. It appealed to God and Christ for mercy and deliverance. It had a sense of helplessness about it. There was in much of it the clear ring of despondency. It implicated the White man but without mentioning him directly. It expressed the somber urgency to 'lay one's burden down' in the hereafter. It was very like prayer. As some have said, it was spiritual poetry. It did not seem to accuse the living for the painful condition of life. It was as if these conditions were intended by the Lord to test one's worth in suffering--like the agonies of Job with all his boils. The poetry found refuge in prayer put to music. It evoked images of peaceful valley's of the soul where, in prayer, there were no more burdens and no more conflicts or wars, and where there was only one more river to cross. It's scene was agricultural; its life was plantation, and its soul, the soul of the slave. It stood alone in the idea that 'nobody knows the trouble I see'. It yearned for the hereafter and eternal peace. But it could be lively. It was oftener sad and slow. The pace of the poem, the form it took and the manner of its expression seem only to spell out the different moods of these poems. The world view of lonely trouble--trouble endured only in the eyes of God--did not change with change of pace or style. the promised land remained unreachable until death, and death was not death as most of us view death. Death was simply stealing away, stealing away to Jesus, stealing away home.
This unknown poet paused a moment before his final ascent to the Promised land to sting the Hypocrite, the living symbol of his oppression, his earthly agony. The objects of longing or yearning are 'home'. Home is other worldly. It is the Promised land, and to get there one slips away to it when the Chariot swings low. The swinging low of the Chariot is itself a symbolic of weakening from agony as one grows older. Weakening and slipping away are one and the same in this consciousness. By Mark C. Kennedy, '52 to communicate with Mr. Kennedy. December Newsletter Go To Current Newsletter |