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ALDON LYNN NIELSEN

Mater proteg1do por d:rechos de ....:.~tor
BLACK CHANT
Languages of African-American
Postmodernism

Aldon Lynn Nielsen

San ]ose State University

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Cambridge University Press 1997

This book is in copyright Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreemen ts,
n o reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First publi.sb ed 1997

Printed in the United States of America.

l}'peset in New Baskerville

Libmry oj Congress Cataioging-in-Publica.tion Data

Nielsen , Aldon Lynn.
B1ack chan t : la nguages of African-American postmodernism 1 Aldon
Lynn Nielsen.
p . cm. - (Cambddge studies in American literature and
culture ; 1os)
lncJudes bibliographical references (p. ) .
ISBN <>-52 1-5551<>-8. -ISBN <>-5 21-55526-4 (pbk.)
1. American p oetry - Afro-Amedcan authors- History a nd criticism .
2 . American poeny - 20th century - History a nd criticism. 3· Music
and literature - United States- History- 2oth century.
4· Postmodemism (Litera.ture)- U nited States. 5· Modernism
(Literarure) - United States. 6. Avant-garde (Aesthetics) - United
States. 7· Afro-Arnericans in litentture. 8. Race in literature.
9· Afro-American arts. 10. Afro-Americans- Intellectual life.
l. Title. U . Series.
PS183.N5N535 1996
8t 1 .oo9' 8g6o73 - dc2o

A catawg record for lhis book is availa.hle from

the British Library.

ISBN o-52 1-555 1<>-8 hardback

ISBN o-521-55526-4 paperback

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 "ÜUTLANTISH" 73

at the same time continuing to work by a poetics of syntactic

compression and surreal imagery. Poem "#4,'' from his 1964
book Six Cylinder Olympus, indicates the direction that would lead
him to such later poems as "BLAUPUNKT." Poem "#4" is a
mythic bit of bragging:
1, Bos Taurus spatha,
Spading the pinto bean earth
Like a wintergreen rubbed down
Sprinter before the gun,
Have repulsed the picadores
U nder the E-flat trumpet sun.
(8)
Johnston has been both the most prolific of the Hov.rard poets
and the most consistent in bis application to the philosophical,
political, and aesthetic issues of his times. In addition to the
separately published prose works he autbored, he filled the pages
of Dasein with a steady stream of meditation and comment. (He
also contributed a translation of Goethe's "Prometheus.") John-
ston regularly published essays in philosophy in his journal, as
Atkins did in Free Lance, and, resembling Atkins in this respect as
well,Johnston often poked fun at his own philosophical interests.
A poem he included in a small volume of pieces by Stone and
himself is entitled "Lines on the Practical and Theoretical Re-
sults of the Impact of Urban Industrial Conditioned Social Phi-
losophy on Aesthetic Delight and or Psychological Well Being,
With Special Reference to the Deterioration of Beneficia}
Hedonism." The small poem nestled in the shadow of this un-
wieldy title appears to be a vernacular translation of the title.
The entire poem consists of the two lines: "They don't get high
for joy 1 In Americano more!" (?) Butjohnston took bis philos-
ophy and its history most seriously. He wrote on Benjamín
Peirce's description of mathematics in the sixth issue of Dasein,
and in an unpublished manuscript Johnston "auempted to clar-
ify Descartes' rejection of Democritus as not solely explainable in
terms of dualistic epistemology and metaphysics" (Phenomenology
g-1on). Later, while working at Montclair State College, he as-
sembled an anthology entitled Afro-American Philoso-phies: Selected
Readings Jrom ]upiter Hammon to Eugene C. Holmes. Johnston was
unwilling to observe the academic separation between the work
of the poet and the scholarship of philosophy. In one of his

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74 THE LINING OF THE HYMN

footnotes to Phenomenology of Space and Time, in fact, he refers

readers to a poem he published in bis 1960 Concerto for Girl and
Convertible and Other Poems as a source for his thesis concerning
cosmology (Phenonumology 31n).
Johnston was Dasein's principal critic and historian, in addi-
tion to being its publisher. His numerous reviews and essays
included important pieces on film criticism and on black histori-
ography. On every occasion, Johnston continued as a proponent
of new writing, as a sharp observer of movements in black aes-
thetics, and as an unrelenting critic of the racial politics of
America's literature industry. His review of the Broadside re-
cording New Jazz Poets is a good example of bis propagandizing
for the new (he calls the album a "prosody shattering disc anthol-
ogy" [44]) and of his promoting, in the Whitman-Pound tradi-
tion, bis own works. (He was one of the poets who performed
their works on the record. In his review he termed bis own
performance "broadsnatching made sophisticated" [46] .) Enti-
tled "Minton's Midtown, Baby!", the review argued for tribal
chant as a frame of reference and applauded poems by David
Henderson, Paul Blackburn, Ronald Stone, and Calvin Hemton
for "restructuring the lyricalline on the foundation built" by jazz
musicians' restructuring of the melody line (45). He singled out
Norman Pritchard's poem "Gyre's Galax" as one of the "most
stirring performances the album has to offer." In discussing
Pritchard's recording, Johnston noted the impossibility of tying
the recited piece to the printed page. William Carlos Williams
inscribed a visual text to be read in a manner quite different,
generally, from his own oral presentations of bis poems; in the
same way, Pritchard's texts are at once concrete, graphic text
imagery and sound texts. Indeed, according to Johnston, "No
one on earth at all can ever aloud, in silence, or any [ other]
method, approximate the poem Pritchard performs" (46). Each
reading, each reiteration of Pritchard's text, must be a renewed
improvisation. As for Pritchard's own realization of the poem, in
Johnston's description, "he whails [wails] & scuttles fast &
dean & nittygritty like Coltrane with Sonny in the audience"
(46).
Another mood entirely is represented by Johnston 's notice of
Williarn Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner; a review
Johnston entitled "Confessions of Whitey." Johnston wasted no
time in getting to his point. The first sentence states, "Styron is a

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 "0UTLANTISH" 75
conscious propagandist & an unconscious bigot" (gg). Bringing
his poet's gift for language to the fray,Johnston wrote that Confes-
sions "re-enforces the priapismic/ phallic myth of sexualis inkco-
lour, of holy sweating fornicatress negritude goodness needing
the puny orgasm of hominy grits Celtic Odin to replace the
tranquil embrace ofEdshu. & out ofsuch false copulation would
springforth a chocolate coloured Jesus/ Madhi/Messiah/ Davidic
Chiruwi cat who would pick up his hammer like Lionel Hamp-
ton & we'd be Flying Home" (gg). Additionally, Johnston takes
the novel's success as yet one more sign of commodification
replacing artistic invention, another sign that "an establishment
publisher can market successfully a nonbook with the sheer
weight & bulk of its massive Brontosauric budget." To Johnston 's
eye, though, an equally troubling phenomenon underscored by
the appearance of Styron 's Confessions was what he too k to be the
failure of black novelists to make viable contemporary art out of
the revised histories made available by scholars like W. E. B.
DuBois, J. A. Rogers, Carter G. Woodson, Rayford Logan, and E.
Franklin Frazier. As Johnston gauged the situation in 1968, black
fiction writers had a good distance to cover in this regard if they
were to reach the level of art grounded in history to be found in
the poetry of Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, Sterling Brown,
LeRoiJones, and Walt De Legall (gg). Whatjohnston hoped for
in fiction, and what he hoped anger over Styron's book might
hurry along, was that black novelists would use historical materi-
als artistically to "destroy the air castles" of history constructed
by popularly accepted white novelists, in the same way that Ralph
Ellison, LeRoi Jones, and A B. SpelJman had demolished the
standard interpretive models of jazz history propounded by
white critics. In the end Johnston carne, by a peculiarly unlikely
route, to a call for white authors to redirect their energies:
"Styron might redeem his artistic soul (if any) by following the
suggestion that William F. Buckley & Godfrey Cambridge agreed
on in a recent telecast, study white America. Then perhaps we
can look fonvard to the 'Confessions of the Grand Whatsis of
the Ku Klux Klan/ or the 'Confessions of Quantrell,' or 'The
Authorised Confessions ofThomasjefferson', (gg).
Johnston has made a lengthy voyage along the uncharted bor-
ders of American publishing since the days when he and the
other Howard poets read at Coffee and Confusion in Washing-
ton, D.C., and were invited to read at the Library of Congress.

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 THE LINING OF THE HYMN

This was about as close to critica! acknowledgment as the Dasein

group was ever to come. The Dasein poets have remained a
mostly unknown site of black poetic invention, despite John-
ston 's positive genius for self-promotion. (Reprising a Wbitman-
ian moment, Johnston sent the manuscript of his poetic tribute
in memory of the late John F. Kennedy to then Attorney General
Robert Kennedy and subsequently published the attorney gener-
al's thank-you note, on official stationery, asan addendum to the
book version of Sean PendTagon Requiem [27].) The Dasein group
began by publishing their lack of concern for establishment
acceptance, andjohnston began his publishing ventures out of a
conviction that there was little hope that black writing so "out-
sirle" would ever be taken on by the establishment press. Had he
not made that decision, the texts of the group might have re-
mained wholly unavailable, and an important moment in the
history of Mrican-American verse culture might have gone unre-
corded. Johnston has continued to find ways to reach a large
public without subjecting himself to critica! mediations. For
sorne years he operated a theater in Greenwich Vi1lage, Studio
Tangerine, where, in addition to plays by Sartre and Shake-
speare, he was able to stage bis own writings for a wider audi-
ence. It was here that he developed Dessalines: A ]azz Tragedy,
inspired in part by C. L. R. James's Black Jacoh-ins. He later pub-
lished his play in book forro, and it enjoyed severa! productions
during the 1g8os, including a Sobo gallery production presented
by Johnston's old collaborator De Legall.
In hindsight, much of the work that appeared in Dasein seems
rather tame, and, as is so often the case, it was Dasein poets like
Lance Jeffers and Dolores Kendrick, poets whose works, grantiog
their various virtues, were clearly rather normative language con-
structioos, who were later more likely to be mentioned favorably
by critics and historians than were the Dasein founders them-
selves. lt is thanks to literary histories like Napier's that we are
able to reconstruct the network of new writing in Washington,
D.C., at the beginning of the postmodern era. As Johnston's
work on New Jazz Poets and De Legall's work at the Soho gallery
demonstrate, those Dasein poets who continued actively in the
arts were directly engaged with other vortices of black creativity
in America. The Dasein poets may have yet to attract the level of
attention afforded to black Village poets or the Umbra group
(which is little attention indeed compared with the literary indus-

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