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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).
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In
Nightmare Begins Responsibility (1975), Harper continued
his variations on kinship, history, the wholistic universe, and an
individual's responsibility. 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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Behind the Dream
The Making of the Speech that Transformed a
Nation
By
Clarence B. Jones and Stuart Connelly
“I
Have a Dream.”
When those words were spoken on the steps of
the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, the
crowd stood, electrified, as Martin Luther
King, Jr. brought the plight of African
Americans to the public consciousness and
firmly established himself as one of the
greatest orators of all time.
Behind the Dream is a thrilling,
behind-the-scenes account of the weeks
leading up to the great event, as told by
Clarence Jones, co-writer of the speech and
close confidant to King. Jones was there, on
the road, collaborating with the great minds
of the time, and hammering out the ideas and
the speech that would shape the civil rights
movement and inspire Americans for years to
come.—Palgrave Macmillan |
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The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story
of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
By Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer
American democracy is informed by the 18th century’s most cutting edge thinking on society, economics, and government. We’ve learned some things in the intervening 230 years about self interest, social behaviors, and how the world works. Now, authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that some fundamental assumptions about citizenship, society, economics, and government need updating. For many years the dominant metaphor for understanding markets and government has been the machine. Liu and Hanauer view democracy not as a machine, but as a garden. A successful garden functions according to the inexorable tendencies of nature, but it also requires goals, regular tending, and an understanding of connected ecosystems. The latest ideas from science, social science, and economics—the cutting-edge ideas of today—generate these simple but revolutionary ideas: (The economy is not an efficient machine. It’s an effective garden that need tending. Freedom is responsibility. Government should be about the big what and the little how. True self interest is mutual interest. |
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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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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
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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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