Young African American Poets: A Celebration of New Writing
Poetry Readings by Evie Shockly, Douglas Kearney,
and Amaud Jamal Johnson

Tuesday, October 28, 4pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Co-sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature
Reading Series and New Ideas in African American Studies
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu

Evie Shockley is the author of a chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), and the collection a half-red sea (2006). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Fascicle, Hambone, HOW2, and Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University. Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and teacher. His work has appeared in Callaloo, jubilat, Ninth Letter, and other journals. His first full-length collection of poetry, Fear, Some, was published in October 2006. Amaud Jamaul Johnson is a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry Daily, From the Fishouse, and other journals. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first book, Red Summer, was the winner of the 2004 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press.

]]> http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/a-celebration-of-new-writing/feed/ beineckepoetry http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/%e2%80%9cno-crystal-stair%e2%80%9d/ http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/%e2%80%9cno-crystal-stair%e2%80%9d/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:47:10 +0000 beineckepoetry http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/?p=52

The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection has recently acquired a group of working manuscripts prepared by African American writers for the Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration in the mid 1930s. The typescript essay drafts that remain of the project, which may have been titled “Life Ain’t Been No Crystal Stair: An Informal History of Negros in New York,” include work by Ralph Ellison, Claude McKay, Charles Siebert, and many others. The proposed project seems never to have been completed and the majority of the work in this collection of manuscripts was never published in this form.

Among the many writers and subjects represented are the following: Ralph Ellison on the Anti-Slavery Movement in the US; Abram Hill on Negro Poets; Charles Siebert and Ted Poston on the Underground Railroad; Henry Lee Moon on Ben Fletcher and the IWW; Claude McKay on Negro Theatre; Hugo Gellert on Negro Folk Songs (a later version of this essay was published in The Masses,); Lasalle Best on Negro Musicians in New York; Roy Ottley on The Reaction of Southern Negroes in New York City.

A record for the collection can be located in the library’s Uncataloged Accessions Database: No Crystal Stair. An informal history of Negros in New York: essays by Ralph Ellison and others: typescripts, corrected.

Images: manuscript pages from “No Crystal Stair” (click on any photo to see a larger view).

Some of the creators and administrators of Beinecke Library blogs will be joining with other blogging special collections librarians and curators to present a Blog Boot Camp at the 49th Annual Rare Books and Manuscripts / American Library Association Conference at the Getty Research Center on June 26, 2008. All conference attendees are welcome and encouraged to join the conversation; for our colleagues and interested readers unable to attend the conference session, the conversation will be documented and augmented on the RBMS Blog Boot Camp Blog, which was set up in early June 2008 to support the seminar and provide a forum for continuing the conversation.

The Blog Boot Camp Blog highlights many of the various questions that panelists in the seminar will discuss and we invite readers to contribute thoughts, ideas, and additional questions. We’re especially interested in hearing from special collections staff currently utilizing blogs and other participatory web technologies. Thanks in advance for your interest and participation.

Additional Resources: Blogging at the Beinecke: Promoting Special Collections in the 21st Century; RBMS Conference details; ALA Conference details.

Image: Dorothy Porter Wesley, Howard University Librarian, photographed by Carl Van Vechten on May 23, 1951. Dorothy Porter Wesley was influential in developing archives and bibliographies concerning African American culture.

Photographs by Carl Van Vechten are used with permission of the Van Vechten Trust; the permission of the Trust is required to reprint or use Van Vechten photographs in any way. To contact the Trust email: Van Vechten Trust.

]]> http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/blogs-and-special-collections/feed/ beineckepoetry http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/poems-from-prison/ http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/poems-from-prison/#comments Mon, 12 May 2008 23:10:38 +0000 beineckepoetry http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/?p=47

Cell Song

Night Music Slanted
Light strike the cave
of sleep. I alone
tread the red circle

and twist the space
with speech.
Come now, etheridge, don’t

be a savior; take
your words and scrape
the sky, shake rain

on the desert, sprinkle
salt on the tail
of a girl,

can there anything
good come out of
prison

by Etheridge Knight

The prison literature genre dates back at least 524 AD, when Boethius wrote his Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned and awaiting execution by Theodoric the Great. Incarceration in modern America has provided its share of inspiration for writers and poets, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Etheridge Knight, and Stewart Brisby, among many others. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is one of the most famous examples of prison literature, and its argument for action as the only possibly efficacious form of rhetoric is of a piece with poems as disparate as Knight’s “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane,” wherein the narrator laments Hard Rock’s lobotomy because, “He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things / We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do,” and Harold E. Packwood’s “The Red-Neck Coke Machine,” which returns the poet’s quarter “Along with a note, / Saying, / “Sorry, you’ll have to use / The back of the machine.”

Packwood’s poem is one of his nine poems that appear with those of twenty other prisoners in the chapbook, Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica. This anthology, edited by Celes Tisdale, who visited the prison to teach poetry workshops beginning in 1972, was published in 1974, three years after the Attica Prison Riot that attracted international attention to treatment of prisoners in the United States, and the excesses of officially sanctioned violence. The collection also includes selections from Tisdale’s journals, and biographies of the contributors. Some of the biographies appear to be written by the individuals themselves, while others are by Tisdale. One of the latter, of Mshaka (Willie Monroe), reflects perhaps as well as anything in the collection the uncertainty of life in maximum security. It reads, “Diminutive, incisive young man who was released from prison or transferred after two sessions in the workshop.”

Other volumes of prison literature in the Beinecke Library include Willie J. Williams’ A Flower Blooming in Concrete (1976), Prisoner B. 8266’s (of an unidentified penitentiary) A Tale of a Walled Town and Other Verses (1921), Reachin’ Out by “Christians serving time in the Arizona State Prison,” and Ralph C. Hamm, III’s Dear Stranger/The Wayfarer. The collection also includes a small collection of manuscripts, photographs, and correspondence related to Hamm’s writings and describing his literary work and life inside Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Cedar Junction, in South Walpole, Massachusetts.

Collection description prepared by Jon Sudholt, Y’08.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the establishment of an annual James Weldon Johnson Fellowship in African American Studies. This fellowship is designed to permit outstanding scholars to devote a full academic year in residence at Yale to research and writing in connection with the James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Beinecke Library.

Founded in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial collection stands as a memorial to Dr. James Weldon Johnson and celebrates the accomplishments of African American writers and artists, beginning with those of the Harlem Renaissance. Grace Nail Johnson contributed her husband’s papers, leading the way for gifts of papers from Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White and Poppy Cannon White, Dorothy Peterson, Chester Himes, and Langston Hughes. The collection also contains the papers of Richard Wright and Jean Toomer, as well as smaller groups of manuscripts and correspondence of such writers as Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman.

For the 2008-2009 academic year Emily Bernard, Associate Professor of English and ALANA U. S. Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont, has been appointed the Beinecke Library James Weldon Johnson Fellow. Professor Bernard has edited two books. Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (2001) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship (2004) was chosen by the New York Public Library for its Book for the Teen Age 2006 list. Her essay “Teaching the N Word” appeared in Best American Essays 2006. During the 2008-09 academic year, she will be conducting research for an upcoming book tentatively entitled, White Shadows: Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance. The book will cast new light on the dynamic between Van Vechten, a controversial white patron of African American arts communities, and his black friends and protégés during the 1920s and beyond, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen. White Shadows is scheduled to be published by Yale University Press in 2009.

Thanks to the generosity and cooperation of the Yale African American Studies Department, Professor Bernard will occupy an office with that department and will be able to participate in its wide range of scholarly activities.

Image: Photograph of James Weldon Johnson at his desk; Inaugural James Weldon Johnson Fellow Emily Bernard.

More information: James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at Beinecke Library; African American Studies at Yale; Emily Bernard, UVM Faculty Page

The Beinecke Library is pleased to announce its new staffed reference desk. Researchers and students are welcome to visit the desk to consult with Beinecke staff about the library’s collections. Librarians will be available at the reference desk Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to noon and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 3-5 p.m. Additional hours will be added in the coming weeks. Email reference queries can be directed to: beinecke.library@yale.edu.

For additional information please contact Research Librarian Eva Guggemos at 203-432-6436.

In Battell, 1,000 voices lifted in tribute to MLK

Reported by Robert Kruse; published Monday, April 7, 2008, Yale Daily News
Photographs by Michael Marsland
Slide Show and Audio of the Concert from the Yale Office of Public Affairs
 

The words of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the Black National Anthem, resounded throughout Battell Chapel in two performances Friday honoring the legacy of James Weldon Johnson, the hymn’s composer, on the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

The event, which featured 1,000 singing New Haven elementary and middle-school children during the morning performance, was organized by Willie Ruff, professor at the Yale School of Music, in an attempt to honor and publicize the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Negro Arts and Letters housed in Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Johnson was a poet, songwriter, teacher, lawyer and human-rights advocate during the early 20th century who became a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Besides Johnson’s personal writings, the collection features handwritten manuscripts from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

At Monday morning’s ceremony, Ruff recounted how Johnson and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, originally wrote and composed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” to commemorate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The song was first performed in 1900 by 500 school children in Jacksonville, Fl., where Johnson was a teacher. In memory of King, Ruff tried to recreate that occasion — only with double the number of students — on Friday.

“It was a transforming experience,” Ruff said. “I have thought about this a long time. What it would feel like, sound like?”

Organized in conjunction with New Haven public schools, the 1,000 students at the morning event sang the anthem three times in a row and again at the end of the festivities. The song and event resonated with many of the children.

“We [first] learned the song in fourth grade,” said Andrea Salazar, an eighth-grade student at Nathan Hale School. “It’s talking about the hard times and bringing out a better future.”

Besides singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the event also featured a reading of King’s “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech, which mentions Johnson; a reading of Johnson’s “God’s Trombones”; an interpretive dance by dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade; and musical performances by The Heritage Chorale and The Mitchell-Ruff Duo.

About 200 people attended the afternoon performance.

Ruff described singing the song in school while growing up and its effect on him. Today the song has become a staple of hymnals in many non-black Protestant churches.

“The song has become a song for all people with hope, dignity and aspirations,” Ruff said.

At the end of the night, the impact on the audience members of the music and Johnson’s history was apparent in the re-singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” New Haven resident Kevin DeShields said.

“When we first came together, the song was pretty faint, but by the end of the journey, after hearing the history [and singing it again], you could feel the transformation that it had on people,” he said. 

The Duke Ellington Fellowship at Yale, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Yale School of Musi, and the Yale University Provost’s Office present “Lift Every Voice and Sing” a performance in honor of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at Beinecke Library.

Friday, April 4, 2008, at 7:30pm at Battell Chapel. Featuring hundreds of New Haven school children singing Johnson’s historic anthem, dancer and actor Carmen de Lavallade, actor Ken Robinson, the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, and the Heritage Chorale.

This event is free and open to the public, but tickets are required; tickets available at the Yale School of Music box office, in the lobby of Sprague Hall, 470 College Street. Mon-Fri, 9 am to 5 pm. Information: 203 432-4158 • www.yale.edu/music

Novelist, poet, lawyer, early civil rights activist and educator, Johnson was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a pivotal period of intellectual, political and cultural foment, from which much of the distinctly African-American art, literature and music of the 20th century dates. Johnson grew up in Florida, the son of a waiter and the first female black teacher in that state. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature at Atlanta University, and was the first African American to pass the bar in the state of Florida. In 1906 he became the American consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, and in 1909, consul in Corinto, Nicaragua. In 1920, he was appointed executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His works include: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1920), The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), God’s Trombones (1927) and Along This Way (1933).

Johnson wrote the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in 1900 to music by his brother, John Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954).

The April 4 performance is being presented in recognition of the extensive James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale in the Beinecke Library, founded in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten. The collection is renowned for its holdings of masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, including the original manuscripts of Richard Wright’s Native Son, Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man and God’s Trombones.

Also to be found among the papers, correspondence, art and memorabilia that make up the Johnson Collection are the doctoral thesis of W.E.B. Dubois, with notes by William James; music by Fats Waller and W.C. Handy; and Van Vechten’s photographs of such stage and screen notables as Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Alvin Ailey and Ethel Waters—to name only a few.

Images: Carl Van Vechten’s photograph of Augusta Savage’s sculpture “Lift Every Voice and Sing”; James Weldon Johnson photographed by Carl Van Vechten; cover of Langston Huges’ Weary Blues; Ethel Waters photographed by Carl Van Vechten.

The Jubilee Singers were established in 1871 by Fisk University treasurer George L. White to raise funds for the newly-opened university. The group included eleven students—all former slaves—and two advisors who traveled the country and, eventually, across the Atlantic, performing; they became very well known and they were invited to perform for the President of the United States, the Queen and Prime Minister of England, among many others. They sang sacred hymns and Negro spirituals, dubbed “slave songs,” with an eye not only to earning money for their alma mater, but also to building up positive representations of African-Americans and African-American performance for the concert-going public. The proceeds from their first years of touring were enough to build Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building on the Fisk campus, still standing today.

Taking advantage of their acclaim, other groups toured the nation as “Jubilee singers.” Some of these groups followed the Jubilee Singers’ precedent of presenting strong positive images of African Americans, but most were bands of minstrels who appropriated the identifier “Jubilee” without adopting the Singers’ constructive principles.

The Beinecke Library has various documents relating to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, including the Story of the Jubilee Singers, a broadside advertisement of their second tour of Britain, and promotional documents for competing groups from other Southern states. The records for these documents can be found in Orbis, the Yale Library catalog, and in the library’s Uncatalogued Acquisitions Database. In addition, the Library has materials relating to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and to other Jubilee organizations including programs for performances by the Norfolk Jubilee Singers and the North Carolina Singers of Shaw Collegiate Institute, as well as a novel of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Chariot in the Sky, by Arna Bontemps, whose literary archive resides in the Library. (JS)

Images: Books and ephemeral publications related to the Fisk University Jubilee Singers.

The Beinecke Library has recently acquired a collection of fifty-three previously unpublished letters from Richard Wright to Margaret Ellen Barnes of Oberlin, Ohio. The letters date from May 1938 to March 1939, during which time Wright was living in New York and writing Native Son and Margaret Ellen Barnes, daughter of Margaret Barnes, editor of the Ohio Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, was an aspiring writer–Barnes later became an officer in the U.S. Army.

The correspondence begins with a reply to an unsolicited letter from the young Ms. Barnes and ends the following spring with the latest news and terms of familiarity. In between, letters document their growing friendship and reveal Wright’s warmth and generosity in a supportive role with Barnes, from sharing his own experiences to inquiring about and commenting on Barnes literary work and life, making reading and writing recommendations, and offering help. Letters detail Wright’s progress on Native Son and touch on such subjects as literature and publishing, books he is reading, his identity as a writer and African-American, Chicago and Harlem, his social life and politics, Communism, WWII, and his health and financial concerns. The letters are accompanied by clippings and Guggenheim fellowship application material, including plans for work on Native Son.

A complete record of the collection of letters is available in Orbis, the Yale Library catalog: Richard Wright Letters to Margaret Ellen Barnes. Related materials at the Beinecke Library include the Richard Wright Papers JWJ MSS 3. (MF)

Image: Photograph of Richard Wright (call number: JWJ Zan5 +2 v. 28).