First time commenting on a poetry selection here, so trash me as you like!
First thing I thought of stylistically was Eliot's "The Waste Land." (Also some of Scott Walker's lyrics on his last two albums, but that's the music critic in me.)
My dad was a Navy man so I've always had an interest in the sea and its portrayals -- combined with the horrors described and the even more horrifying tone of some of the narrators, trying to distance themselves (so it seems?) from what they are and do, it's all the more compelling.
Thinking on horror reminds me of an eternal dilemma -- force the truth into an audience's face or suggest and imply? There is room for both, this often does that. Oddly enough, one of the most unsettling lines for me was one of the flattest -- "And there was one--King Anthracite we named him--" It suggests Arendt's banality of evil, the casual sense of 'oh yeah, it was like this.'
The things that strike me most on first read--
(1) the appropriation of the "full fathom five they father lies" poem from The Tempest. The original mingles beauty and horror in a hugely compelling way, and this poem manages to do something very similar, transmuting horror into not beauty but piety (pews, altar lights), which is even worse...
(2) the sheer naivete of assuming the ship's problems were brought on by someone killing an albatross, coming right before the unbearably callow mention of throwing some of the captives overboard to avoid infection.
Stunning-- stunning. Props to TNC as well for giving us Hayden after Komunyakaa-- next week Auden to continue one kind of lineage?
The quote from The Tempest is flagged two lines down with "Tempestuous Sea"-- a brilliant convergence of hymn and allusion. The whole poem can be read as a monstrous reworking of The Tempest, in fact.
The Waste Land is also appropriate, inasmuch as both poems have an early and continued appeal to a corpse, and they each are riffing off the Fisher King myth of life coming out of death and burial.
To me the keynote is the invocation of the names, names explained almost at the end of the poem, so that they can be reheard as murderer's jests.
Not the events of the whole poem, though. It's a mirror-- the middle passage the first section, where the slaves were treated as cattle, then the Spaniard's voice in the third section, decrying the same treatment. And then right in the middle the African leaders who sold out the slaves in the first place...
Hey this is kind of long for a work day. I could only read the 1st part, but it led me to look at some of Hayden's shorter poems. 'Those Winter Sundays' is a true gem. Very beautiful.
This seems much more like Benito Cereno to me than The Tempest...
"the African leaders who sold out the slaves in the first place"
But were getting the story from the perspective of a trader. It's not odd that Africans sold or enslaved their own. What's horrifying about that middle passage is the perspective this retelling is comming from. Someone who, in the context of that time, was doing a job. A noble job.
"We find it paradoxical indeed
that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty
are rooted in the labor of your slaves
should suffer the august John Quincey Adams
to speak with so much passion of the right
of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters
and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero's
garland for Cinquez."
--My favorite passage is really more about a colonial power struggle then the concept of slavery. I think what I'm getting at is the normalcy. All of these dark images, perspectives and voices are describing normal everyday run of the mill events.
I love so much that you are posting a friday poetry series, I'm just bummed I can't give it the read it needs while I'm at work. It's dense and beautiful. I will have to throw in my 2 cents way after everyone else has dissected and chewed through already.
BelleIsa/Persia OTM, it's that sense of normality I was trying to get at with the Arendt observation -- this was just 'everyday' work -- 'business, nothing personal,' or whatever cliche you want. The Burroughs observation about the moment of frozen horror when you realize what's at the end of a fork comes to mind.
to Persia......all poetry is a mirror. We see ourselves in it, on both "sides".
This poem for me speaks to karma. That's all I got. Karma and compassion.
And.....I would love to see some women poets her Mr. Coates.
Here's one to start with:
. . . And the Old Women Gathered (The Gospel Singers)
and the old women gathered
and sang His praises
standing
resolutely together
like supply sergeants who
have seen
everything
and are still
Regular Army: It
was fierce and
not melodic and
although we ran
the sound of it
stayed in our ears . . .
How do you see Karma? Do you mean from the slave traders were getting their due? Cinquez is probably still screwed. He'll still be a slave in America instead of in Cuba.
As BelleIsa said, much like Benito Cereno. If I remember right, a lot of that story is told through court depositions.
To that end, I really like how after such a free structure, the long narrative quote at the end falls into perfectly regulated blank verse. It strikes me as a last-ditch effort to cover all the horror we've witnessed with some kind of civilized veneer.
Canuck: I can't decide whether I think the albatross is a Coleridge allusion or simply referring to the actual superstition about killing albatrosses. Given how allusive the rest of the poem is, I suppose we have to assume he at least has the Ancient Mariner in mind on some level.
What struck me about it was the reflexive superstition about small actions traditionally forbidden in the middle of a horrendous wrong that is many orders of magnitude greater than that traditionally forbidden act. How much simpler it is to adhere to superstitious rules of the sea.
Taken next to this one, Coleridge's poem seems like a kind of gratuitous exercise in writing about suffering.
One of the things I love about this poem is that it doesn't let anyone off the hook for the horror of slavery. Even the self-righteousness of the early abolitionists is pierced in this poem. It was a difficult line for Hayden to walk, but he walked it beautifully.
I don't have any analysis to offer, but when I was reading this I mainly learning about the slave trade in my history classes in high school. The horror of it was described, but somehow this gets it across so much more effectively than descriptions.
Or maybe it's just that I'm older, and more sensitive to the horror.
Thanks, TNC, for making another great choice! And I've enjoyed reading the comments so far.
I do hope, though, that once we've dissected this poem for its literary allusions to Eliot and Shakespeare (and others) and historical references to Cinque (and others), we can also see Hayden's efforts to assemble his own unique product. In capturing the desperation and suffering of the Middle Passage, he fills in the gaps and silences of the black voices unremembered and unaccounted for in the court testimony and captain's logs. The variations on that mournful refrain: "Voyage through death / to life upon these shores" seems to me Hayden's effort to allow the perspective of the slaves to guide our reading and shape an altogether new understanding. This was pretty monumental in the 1940s, when the poem was first published.
(I'm not saying that y'all don't already know/think/have said this - but I just wanted to re-emphasize the point...)
I admit, I'm a political junkie, who decided to swim in the deep end of the pool by reading today's poem. Thank you for the opportunity to feel and think about something other than the here and now. This poem has me thinking about how I got here right now.
Thanks for posting this poem--I've always liked Hayden's work, and this one is especially powerful.
Somewhat along the lines of Claudia's comment above: Those concluding lines of the poem reminded me, this time around, of Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America" (published 1773):
Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic dye."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
In each, there is the promise of redemption, though of rather different kinds. As many commenters have noted, Hayden is certainly writing out of an awareness of mainstream literary tradition; like Claudia, though, I'd argue that he's not just performing some Eliotian kowtowing to that tradition. Rather, he's working on dramatizing what lies below the decks, as it were, of that tradition.
Damn ... that's an amazing poem. I remember seeing it in an anthology or someplace back when I was in college, but I sure as hell didn't appreciate it then.
The killer lines for me are:
"Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move,"
Such a wealth of imagery in those few words. Boats shuttling human cargo back and forth across the Atlantic ... History as both (Fates-like?) weaver, but also the dark thing that hovers ("looms") over our collective past ...
Metrically gorgeous, too: look how "rocking" is at the first line's exact center gravity, followed by the repeated iambic rhythms in the second.
Here's a piece no one cared about. Meh, whatever, probably the most enjoyable article I did during my stint at TIME. Premiered a month before I got laid-off. The nail in the coffin? Ya think?
Here's me going after Al. I didn't so much have a problem with him, as I had a problem with media acting like this dude was the go-to guy for everything black.
This was my first real story at time. I was writing for the Business section, a real change of direction for me. At any rate, it's about Wal-Mart's attempts to colonize the inner-city. As much as I enjoyed this piece, I mostly enjoyed going out to Chicago, which is a beautiful, beautiful city.
This a piece I did about the cops just outside our nation capitol, in Prince George's County, a few years back. I wanted to offer a counter to the dumb, conventional wisdom that if you paint your police force black, you could eradicate police brutality. In fact, Prince George's--one of the richest, blackest counties in the country--also had one of the most brutal police force's in the country.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
First time commenting on a poetry selection here, so trash me as you like!
First thing I thought of stylistically was Eliot's "The Waste Land." (Also some of Scott Walker's lyrics on his last two albums, but that's the music critic in me.)
My dad was a Navy man so I've always had an interest in the sea and its portrayals -- combined with the horrors described and the even more horrifying tone of some of the narrators, trying to distance themselves (so it seems?) from what they are and do, it's all the more compelling.
Thinking on horror reminds me of an eternal dilemma -- force the truth into an audience's face or suggest and imply? There is room for both, this often does that. Oddly enough, one of the most unsettling lines for me was one of the flattest -- "And there was one--King Anthracite we named him--" It suggests Arendt's banality of evil, the casual sense of 'oh yeah, it was like this.'
The things that strike me most on first read--
(1) the appropriation of the "full fathom five they father lies" poem from The Tempest. The original mingles beauty and horror in a hugely compelling way, and this poem manages to do something very similar, transmuting horror into not beauty but piety (pews, altar lights), which is even worse...
(2) the sheer naivete of assuming the ship's problems were brought on by someone killing an albatross, coming right before the unbearably callow mention of throwing some of the captives overboard to avoid infection.
Stunning-- stunning. Props to TNC as well for giving us Hayden after Komunyakaa-- next week Auden to continue one kind of lineage?
The quote from The Tempest is flagged two lines down with "Tempestuous Sea"-- a brilliant convergence of hymn and allusion. The whole poem can be read as a monstrous reworking of The Tempest, in fact.
The Waste Land is also appropriate, inasmuch as both poems have an early and continued appeal to a corpse, and they each are riffing off the Fisher King myth of life coming out of death and burial.
To me the keynote is the invocation of the names, names explained almost at the end of the poem, so that they can be reheard as murderer's jests.
This is a link to a rather long essay on line inre the events of the poem: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/trialheroes/Tappanessay.html.
Not the events of the whole poem, though. It's a mirror-- the middle passage the first section, where the slaves were treated as cattle, then the Spaniard's voice in the third section, decrying the same treatment. And then right in the middle the African leaders who sold out the slaves in the first place...
There's a lot here.
Hey this is kind of long for a work day. I could only read the 1st part, but it led me to look at some of Hayden's shorter poems. 'Those Winter Sundays' is a true gem. Very beautiful.
This seems much more like Benito Cereno to me than The Tempest...
"the African leaders who sold out the slaves in the first place"
But were getting the story from the perspective of a trader. It's not odd that Africans sold or enslaved their own. What's horrifying about that middle passage is the perspective this retelling is comming from. Someone who, in the context of that time, was doing a job. A noble job.
"We find it paradoxical indeed
that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty
are rooted in the labor of your slaves
should suffer the august John Quincey Adams
to speak with so much passion of the right
of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters
and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero's
garland for Cinquez."
--My favorite passage is really more about a colonial power struggle then the concept of slavery. I think what I'm getting at is the normalcy. All of these dark images, perspectives and voices are describing normal everyday run of the mill events.
I love so much that you are posting a friday poetry series, I'm just bummed I can't give it the read it needs while I'm at work. It's dense and beautiful. I will have to throw in my 2 cents way after everyone else has dissected and chewed through already.
Good points, BelleIsa. What we take as horror was normal for the traders and the colonials.
BelleIsa/Persia OTM, it's that sense of normality I was trying to get at with the Arendt observation -- this was just 'everyday' work -- 'business, nothing personal,' or whatever cliche you want. The Burroughs observation about the moment of frozen horror when you realize what's at the end of a fork comes to mind.
"the sheer naivete of assuming the ship's problems were brought on by someone killing an albatross"
This is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, no?
to Persia......all poetry is a mirror. We see ourselves in it, on both "sides".
This poem for me speaks to karma. That's all I got. Karma and compassion.
And.....I would love to see some women poets her Mr. Coates.
Here's one to start with:
. . . And the Old Women Gathered (The Gospel Singers)
and the old women gathered
and sang His praises
standing
resolutely together
like supply sergeants who
have seen
everything
and are still
Regular Army: It
was fierce and
not melodic and
although we ran
the sound of it
stayed in our ears . . .
~~Mari Evans
renegademom3: he's had lady poets.
How do you see Karma? Do you mean from the slave traders were getting their due? Cinquez is probably still screwed. He'll still be a slave in America instead of in Cuba.
Cinquez returned to Africa, actually. Does the poem read differently with that knowledge in mind?
Really? Persia can you show me where?
As BelleIsa said, much like Benito Cereno. If I remember right, a lot of that story is told through court depositions.
To that end, I really like how after such a free structure, the long narrative quote at the end falls into perfectly regulated blank verse. It strikes me as a last-ditch effort to cover all the horror we've witnessed with some kind of civilized veneer.
Canuck: I can't decide whether I think the albatross is a Coleridge allusion or simply referring to the actual superstition about killing albatrosses. Given how allusive the rest of the poem is, I suppose we have to assume he at least has the Ancient Mariner in mind on some level.
What struck me about it was the reflexive superstition about small actions traditionally forbidden in the middle of a horrendous wrong that is many orders of magnitude greater than that traditionally forbidden act. How much simpler it is to adhere to superstitious rules of the sea.
Taken next to this one, Coleridge's poem seems like a kind of gratuitous exercise in writing about suffering.
Belle,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cinqu%C3%A9
One of the things I love about this poem is that it doesn't let anyone off the hook for the horror of slavery. Even the self-righteousness of the early abolitionists is pierced in this poem. It was a difficult line for Hayden to walk, but he walked it beautifully.
i don't mean karma like "what goes around comes around", I mean it more in an existential way. the shit hits everyone.
guess i've missed the women poets.......
I don't have any analysis to offer, but when I was reading this I mainly learning about the slave trade in my history classes in high school. The horror of it was described, but somehow this gets it across so much more effectively than descriptions.
Or maybe it's just that I'm older, and more sensitive to the horror.
Either way, this was deeply moving.
Thanks, TNC, for making another great choice! And I've enjoyed reading the comments so far.
I do hope, though, that once we've dissected this poem for its literary allusions to Eliot and Shakespeare (and others) and historical references to Cinque (and others), we can also see Hayden's efforts to assemble his own unique product. In capturing the desperation and suffering of the Middle Passage, he fills in the gaps and silences of the black voices unremembered and unaccounted for in the court testimony and captain's logs. The variations on that mournful refrain: "Voyage through death / to life upon these shores" seems to me Hayden's effort to allow the perspective of the slaves to guide our reading and shape an altogether new understanding. This was pretty monumental in the 1940s, when the poem was first published.
(I'm not saying that y'all don't already know/think/have said this - but I just wanted to re-emphasize the point...)
I admit, I'm a political junkie, who decided to swim in the deep end of the pool by reading today's poem. Thank you for the opportunity to feel and think about something other than the here and now. This poem has me thinking about how I got here right now.
Thanks for posting this poem--I've always liked Hayden's work, and this one is especially powerful.
Somewhat along the lines of Claudia's comment above: Those concluding lines of the poem reminded me, this time around, of Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America" (published 1773):
Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic dye."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
In each, there is the promise of redemption, though of rather different kinds. As many commenters have noted, Hayden is certainly writing out of an awareness of mainstream literary tradition; like Claudia, though, I'd argue that he's not just performing some Eliotian kowtowing to that tradition. Rather, he's working on dramatizing what lies below the decks, as it were, of that tradition.
Damn ... that's an amazing poem. I remember seeing it in an anthology or someplace back when I was in college, but I sure as hell didn't appreciate it then.
The killer lines for me are:
"Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move,"
Such a wealth of imagery in those few words. Boats shuttling human cargo back and forth across the Atlantic ... History as both (Fates-like?) weaver, but also the dark thing that hovers ("looms") over our collective past ...
Metrically gorgeous, too: look how "rocking" is at the first line's exact center gravity, followed by the repeated iambic rhythms in the second.
Wow. Thanks so much for posting that.