Michael S. Harper

Harper, Michael S. (b. 1938), poet, scholar, teacher, and critic. Michael S. Harper was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Walter Warren Harper, a postal worker, and Katherine Johnson Harper, a medical stenographer. Harper recalls his family's move in 1951 to a predominantly white Los Angeles neighborhood grappling with racial tension as a traumatic enough experience to “make” him a poet. Also, his family had an extensive record collection that profoundly affected Harper's poetry. Encouraged to pursue medicine, Harper became only a marginal student after an asthma condition kept him from participating in a junior high gym class, which earned him a failing grade and kept him off the honor roll. At Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, Harper was placed on the vocational track, a situation his father had to “straighten out” so that his son could be on track toward a medical career. During high school, Harper avoided preparing to become a doctor, and he even got significant encouragement from a college zoology professor who told him that black people could not get into medical school. During his high school years Harper wrote a few poems, but he had not yet considered writing as an option for a career.

In 1955, he 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. Many of his coworkers were educated black men like Harper's father who had bumped against the glass ceiling of advancement in the American workplace. Their experiences, 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).

The only black student in both his poetry and fiction classes at Iowa, Harper encountered painter Oliver Lee Jackson, who would influence Harper's thinking. Moreover, he lived in segregated housing, which runs counter to the democratic principles of this nation and best illustrates what Harper calls the schizophrenia of this society. This idea encompasses more than the politics and legacy of racial segregation; it is involved in the very English we speak and the logic we follow. Such binary oppositions as white and black, hot and cold, set the language against itself through 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 philosophy serves as a basis for the themes, aesthetics, and strategies of his poetry, which include music, kinship, history, and mythology.

For Harper, history and mythology are similar in that neither is fully constituted or contained by its written or commonly understood versions. Such mythologies as white supremacy, and the marred history it engenders, too rigidly encase humanity in static categories. Manipulating old European and American myths and creating new ones illustrates a goal and technique Harper uses throughout his poetry, beginning with his first volume, Dear John Dear Coltrane (1970). In the volume, John Coltrane, who Harper knew, is both the man and his jazz, the talented and tragic musician, and his wholistic worldview and redemptive music. With an understanding of black music similar to W. E. B. Du Bois's in his description of the African American “sorrow songs,” Harper includes the music of poetry as similar affirmation of the importance of articulating suffering to gain from it and survive it. Here, as in Harper's later volumes, musical rhythm replaces traditional metrics in the poetry without sacrificing craft. Coltrane becomes a link between the personal and historical, pain and its expression, suffering and love. To extend these themes, Harper devotes a section of the volume to poems about his own kin, thematically and literally personalizing history so that family ties become continuities of humanity as they link the individual with both a personal and collective history. This opening and overlapping of historical and personal possibility, in the context of Harper's interest in music, seems to provide a handle on Harper's difficult and abstract concept of musical and poetic modality.

In his subsequent volumes, Harper built upon and expanded his philosophy and repertoire of themes and strategies. In 1971, History Is Your Own Heartbeat garnered Harper the Poetry Award of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. Instead of famous musicians, the volume focuses on Harper's family to explore similar issues as Harper's previous volume. Next, Song: I Want a Witness (1972) uses black religion as a subtext for its meditations on black history, while, in the second section, the volume dialogues with William Faulkner's short story “The Bear”, adding an element of literary history to Harper's thematics. From this volume also comes the limited edition Photographs: Negatives: History as Apple Tree (1972). Nightmare Begins Responsibility, a volume published in 1975, is another variation on the poet's philosophy of kinship, history, the wholistic universe, and an individual's responsibility to all of these. In many ways, it serves as the sequel to both Song: I Want a Witness and Debridement (1973), and is considered Harper's richest volume. In it, Harper uses poems to address kinship in a jazz-blues idiom; to consider the death of his friend Ralph Albert Dickey; to affirm responsible action, like Jackie Robinson's, in the face of a racist nightmare; and to establish the poet's literary, personal, and historical ties to other African American literary and historical figures. Images of Kin (1977) earned Harper the Melville-Cane Award and a nomination for the 1978 National Book Award. Four other volumes, Rhode Island: Eight Poems (1981), Healing Song for the Inner Ear (1985), a limited edition entitled Songlines: Mosaics (1991), and Honorable Amendments : Poems (1995) have since been published.

By the mid 1970s, Harper's reputation as a poet, scholar, and teacher was firmly established. Among many other awards, such as the National Institute of Arts and Letters Creative Writing Award (1972), a Guggenheim fellowship (1976), and a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1977), Harper received an American specialist grant in 1977, with which he traveled to Ghana, South Africa, Zaire, Senegal, Gambia, Botswana, Zambia, and Tanzania. In several published interviews, Harper affirms the influence this trip had on his thinking and writing. Among Harper's former students are Gayl Jones, Melvin Dixon, and Anthony Walton. As a scholar, Harper has made several contributions, including a collaboration with Robert Stepto entitled Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, an edition of Sterling A. Brown's poetry, a limited edition of Robert Hayden's American Journal, and Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep, an anthology of African American poetry since 1945. Harper, poet laureate of the state of Rhode Island, is currently a professor at Brown University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

Bibliography

• John O’Brien, “Michael Harper,” in Interviews with Black Writers, 1973, pp. 95–107.
• Edwin Fussell, “Double-Conscious Poet in the Veil,” Parnassus 4 (Fall/Winter 1975): 5–28.
• Robert B. Stepto, “Michael S. Harper, Poet as Kinsman: The Family Sequences,” Massachusetts Review 17 (Autumn 1976): 477–502.
• Robert B. Stepto, “After Modernism, After Hibernation: Michael Harper, Robert Hayden and Jay Wright,” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, eds. Michael S. Harper et al., 1979, pp. 470–486.
• Michael S. Harper, “My Poetic Technique and the Humanization of the American Audience,” in Black American Literature and Humanism, ed. R. Baxter Miller, 1981, pp. 27–31.
• Gunter H. Lenz, “Black Poetry and Black Music: History and Tradition: Michael Harper and John Coltrane,” in History and Tradition in Afro-American Culture, 1984, pp. 277–319.
• Joseph Brown, “Their Long Scars Touch Ours: A Reflection on the Poetry of Michael Harper,” Callaloo 9.1 (1986): 209–220.
• “Michael S. Harper: American Poet,” Callaloo 13.4 (Fall 1990): 749–829.
• Elizabeth Dodd, “Another Version: Michael S. Harper, William Clark, and the Problem of Historical Blindness,” Western American Literature 33:1 (Spring 1998): 61–72

Keith D. Leonard

poet; college teacher

Personal Information

Born March 18, 1938, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Walter Warren and Katherine (Johnson) Harper; married Shirley Ann Buffington, December 24, 1965; children: Roland Warren, Patrice Cuchulain, Rachel Maria
Education: Los Angeles City College, A.A., 1959; Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles), B.A., 1961, M.A., 1963; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1963.
Memberships: American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Career

Contra Costa College, instructor in English, 1964-68; Lewis and Clark College, poet in residence, 1968-69; California State College (now California State University), associate professor of English, 1970; Brown University, associate professor, 1971-73, full professor, 1973-; numerous visiting professorships; published first book of poetry, Dear John, Dear Coltrane, 1970; eight full-length books of poetry plus other poems and collections; edited standard collections of African-American poetry.

Life's Work

Michael S. Harper has been called America's finest poet; among African-American poets working within the academic world, he is the unquestioned dean. His complex works do not yield their deeper contents easily upon cursory readings, but Harper's poetry is widely taught in literature classes and urged upon readers by the many honors he has received. Those who make the effort will find a body of work in which the African-American past is raised to a level of universal tragedy by virtue of Harper's unique style--one that blends the personal, the historical, and the musical in a unique tapestry. A professor at Brown University since 1970, Harper has stimulated the careers of younger African-American poets of various styles.

Harper was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 18, 1938; his father was a postal supervisor and his mother a medical secretary. One aspect of his childhood that had a lasting influence was his parents' large collection of 78-rpm jazz recordings, and another, though less positive, influence was his family's move to Los Angeles in 1951. The previously segregated neighborhood in which they settled saw fire bombings when blacks began to move in. Pressured to become a physician to follow in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather, Harper was an indifferent student at Dorsey High School. School staff who placed him in vocational-track classes didn't help his motivation level, although his father showed up at school to insist that he be allowed to pursue a college preparatory curriculum.

Enrolling at Los Angeles State College, Harper took pre-med classes while holding down a full-time job at the post office. There he encountered well-educated African Americans whom the institutions of racism had robbed of the chance to utilize their talents; Harper seemed destined to suffer the same fate after a white zoology professor pressured him to give up his medical career, saying that blacks were unable to survive the rigors of medical school. But Harper blossomed as a student for the first time in his English courses, where he was especially impressed by Ralph Ellison's novel The Invisible Man and by the spiritually intense writings of English Romantic poet John Keats. Harper's own interest in writing, which had first stirred while he was still in high school, inspired him to enroll at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1961.

There Harper once again was dispirited by discrimination in the form of segregated housing arrangements, but he began to focus seriously on poetry. The experience propelled him to a master of arts in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1963. For the rest of the 1960s Harper taught at various schools in the West--Contra Costa College, Reed College, Lewis and Clark College, and California State College (now University) at Hayward. He had poems published in various academic and general journals and began to bring together the materials that in 1970 would be published as his first book of poems, Dear John, Dear Coltrane. Harper submitted the book to an annual competition sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh, and it was at that point that the U.S. poetry establishment realized that it had a major new talent on its hands.

Dear John, Dear Coltrane was inspired by Harper's friendship with the recently deceased jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, but the poems in the book address Coltrane and his music only obliquely. Instead, Coltrane serves as a reference point around which Harper connects personal and familial experiences with black history and with American experience in general. In one widely quoted reflection upon his status as an African-American poet, Harper said, "I don't believe in either/or. I believe in both/and. I'm not a Cartesian poet." Dear John, Dear Coltrane did not win the Pittsburgh prize, but in 1970 it earned Harper a professorship in the English department at Brown, where he has taught ever since. The volume was nominated for a National Book Award in 1971.

Dear John, Dear Coltrane demonstrates several features of Harper's mature style, one of which is a fascination with black music and an attempt to reproduce some of its qualities in words. Although he avoids the obviously rhythmic quality cultivated by other African-American poets (critic Amiri Baraka, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, once dubbed him the "rhythmless Michael Harper"), his poems capture the subtleties of jazz--its capacity for allusion, for homage, for wise commentary. The structure of the book--widely disparate poems united by a theme that has both personal and cultural resonances--was typical of Harper's later works.

In his next book History Is Your Own Heartbeat, for example, Harper begins with a personal and seemingly everyday theme, his mother-in-law's sufferings from gallstones. But that theme is expanded into a range of symbolic meanings--the gallstones become symbolic of various kinds of American illness, both spiritual and physical, among whites as well as blacks. His Images of Kin (1977) and other books likewise address not only members of Harper's own family but also musicians and African-American leaders of the past. Images of Kin made explicit Harper's complex attempt to place himself within history: It is structured in reverse chronological order. Images of Kin gained Harper another National Book Award nomination in 1978.

Like the literary critic and novelist Albert Murray, Harper tends to speak in an unusual mixture of academic theoretical language and African-American vernacular speech. He has used the term "modality" to describe aspects of his poetic technique, and observers have vigorously discussed exactly what is meant by the word. In music, modality is the structuring of a composition around a certain selection of tones and melodic gestures, a subtle flavor that is imparted to a piece of music by its raw materials. Harper has also drawn contrasts between the idea of a poetic mode and the dualistic European philosophical outlook that divides the world into body and mind, life and spirit, and, for that matter, white and black; for Harper a mode is a unified way of looking at the world. "Our mode is our jam session/of tradition,/past in this present moment/articulated, blown through/with endurance,/an unreaching extended/improvised love of past masters," Harper writes in his poem "Corrected Review."

Harper has continued to write, although not quite so prolifically, in the years since the 1970s. His book Healing Song for the Inner Ear appeared in 1984, and Honorable Amendments in 1995. His volume of collected works, Songlines in Michaeltree, (2000) also included new poems. In the 1990s Harper edited or co- edited several standard collections of African-American poetry. He served as the first Poet Laureate of the state of Rhode Island from 1988 to 1993.

Awards

Selected: Center for Advanced Study fellowship, University of Illinois, 1970-71; Black Academy of Arts and Letters award, 1972, for History Is Your Own Heartbeat; National Institute of Arts and Letters award and American Academy award in literature, both 1972; Guggenheim fellowship, 1976; National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing award, 1977; National Book Award nomination, 1978, for Images of Kin.

Works

Selected writings

• Dear John, Dear Coltrane, 1970.
• History Is Our Heartbeat, 1971.
• Song: I Want a Witness, 1972.
• Debridement, 1973.
• Nightmare Begins Responsibility, 1975.
• Images of Kin, 1977.
• Healing Song for the Inner Ear, 1984.
• Honorable Amendments, 1995.
• Songlines in Michaeltree (collected works and new poems), 2000.

Further Reading

Books

• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets Since 1955, Gale, 1985.

• African American Review, Fall 2000, p. 501.
• Booklist, February 15, 1994, p. 1054; February 15, 2001, p. 1102.
• Publishers Weekly, November 27, 1995, p. 66; February 7, 2000, p. 72; August 28, 2000, p. 79.

• Contemporary Authors Online, The Gale Group, 2001; reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Gale, 2001, http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC.
• http://www.brown.edu
• http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/harper/life.htm
• http://www.poets.org

— James M. Manheim

Quotes:

"I have a great fear for the moral will of Americans if it takes more than a week to achieve the results."