Plumpp, Sterling (b. 1940), poet, educator, editor, and critic. Writing “tales of who I am” (Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 21, 1995), Sterling Plumpp struggles to create the homeland of the spirit that accidents of birth—racial and economic—and what might be called accidents of destiny—the deaths of loved ones, the historical changes that have swept the African American and world community since his birth—have denied him. Yet his poems have far more than autobiographical resonance, not only because of the allusive, lyrical language in which he writes his best work, but because his quest for identity resonates with the surrounding struggle for freedom of the African American community during the civil rights movement and its aftermath, and, especially in poems chronicling his experiences in Africa, with the struggle during the same years of colonized peoples for national sovereignty.
Sterling Plumpp was born to unmarried parents on 30 January 1940 in Clinton, Mississippi. His maternal grandparents raised him on the cotton plantation where his grandfather, Victor Emmanuel Plumpp, labored as a sharecropper. At age seven, a year before he started school, he joined his grandfather, an older brother, and other relatives in the fields picking cotton, but no amount of work was sufficient to raise the family out of debt. Listening to his grandparents' nightly prayers, Plumpp learned that one “could use words to petition for a different reality.”
The full power of religion struck him in 1951 in a local evangelical church, when the force of a singer's voice prompted him to march to the altar to signify a conversion that soon, however, had to compete with budding adolescent interests. One of the abrupt psychological blows the South could deliver came in 1954, when news of Emmett Till's murder for flirting with a white woman traumatized Plumpp and others of his generation. At sixteen, Plumpp converted to Catholicism, and, throughout high school, cast about for a way to escape the dangers of Jim Crow. Success took the form of an academic scholarship to St. Benedict's College in Atchison, Kansas.
There he had a new kind of conversion experience when he discovered Greek literature and James Baldwin, whose “Sonny's Blues” inspired Plumpp to become a writer. After two years, yearning to write and feeling cut off from black culture, Plumpp left St. Benedict's and traveled north to Chicago.
He found work there in the main post office, read and tried to write in his off hours, and eventually enrolled at Roosevelt University, where he majored in psychology. After completing his bachelor's degree, he enrolled in a graduate program in clinical psychology, but continued to read widely—everything from Amiri Baraka to Jean-Paul Sartre, and, of course, Baldwin, whose The Fire Next Time (1963) struck Plumpp like a thunderbolt—and immersed himself in music. During a “nightmarish” 1964–1965 interlude in the U.S. army, such books were his window to the outside world.
He published his first book, Portable Soul, in 1969, offering poems that drew on the language of the Black Power movement, but also began to construct the vocabulary for Plumpp's tales of identity. Publication led to a job teaching African American studies at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, where Plumpp became a full professor teaching both literature and creative writing.
His second book, Half Black, Half Blacker (1970), continues his simultaneous grappling with late 1960s upheavals in African American identity, and with his ongoing self-creation. Every black man, he writes in “Daybreak,” “is an epic.” The fusion of personal and public struggles is expanded into an impressionistic psychological treatise in Plumpp's 1972 book, Black Rituals. Confronting what he calls the “dragons” of his existence—his sharecropping youth in the Jim Crow South, the saving power of black music as a conduit of the divine, and the centrality of the black church as a repository of African American culture and engine of change—Plumpp created in this book a rough theory of his own and his people's existence.
The theory continued to develop in two long poems, “Steps to Break the Circle” and “Clinton,” published as pamphlets in 1974 and 1976, respectively, and later included in Plumpp's 1982 volume, The Mojo Hands Call / I Must Go. Plumpp's growing interest in international liberation movements also bore fruit in 1982 when he edited an anthology of South African poetry, Somehow We Survive. With the anthology and the new collection, which won the 1983 Carl Sandburg Award, Plumpp established himself as a significant voice in American letters. The new collection's reference to irresistible “Mojo hands,” furthermore, spotlights Plumpp's arrival at a new conceptual plateau in the collection. In “Steps to Break the Circle: An Introduction,” for instance, Plumpp casts a critical, evaluative eye on 1960s poetry and politics, and on his own evolution. He expresses doubts about whether the “answer” that will break the circle of African American pain is 1960s-style black nationalism, and not something at once more “coldly programmatic” and more open to a poetics of individuality.
In Blues: The Story Always Untold (1989), Plumpp firmly attaches himself to the blues as the root of African American poetics. An increasing faith in words as arbiters of reality is expressed in poems celebrating the power of blues singers and of the music that passes through them like a god: When the protagonist of his poem “Mississippi Griot” bent guitar strings, Plumpp writes that his grandfather's “fields were flooded.”
The parallel between African American and South African experience is the force behind Plumpp's 1993 volume, Johannesburg and Other Poems, which grew out of a 1991 visit Plumpp made to South Africa. His observations there taught him, he says, the centrality of class as well as race in African and African American experience. Yet his spiritual repatriation is also a repatriation in suffering. In the title poem, the Johannesburg he experiences is both a song-rich African Harlem, and a dehumanizing “Cold Steel Mountain.” Thus in his “homeland,” Plumpp is cast back on his career-long sifting of memory and history for the elements of identity: “I ask, Johannesburg, if your streets know my name.” In his volume, Hornman (1995), Plumpp returns to his abiding balm, music, seeking the link between his “blues roots” and jazz improvisation. Plumpp published Ornate With Smoke in 1997, and Blues: Narratives in 1999. His importance lies in his ability to communicate the excitement of such quests, and to fix ready-made concepts such as race—inevitable broadcaster of racism that it is—in the way the late Richard Feynman was said to fix radios: by thinking. In his best work, Plumpp makes mind-dimming concepts transmit vision, not hate.
Bibliography
- James Cunningham, “Sterling Plumpp,” in
DLB ,vol. 41 , Afro-American Poets since 1955, eds. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 1985, pp. 257–265. - “
Plumpp, Sterling D(ominic) ,” in Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series,vol. 24 , ed. Deborah A. Straub, 1988, pp. 371–372. - James Cunningham, “Baldwin Aesthetics in Sterling Plumpp's Mojo Poems,”
Black American Literature Forum 23 (Fall 1989): 505–518. - Sterling Plumpp, “Sterling Plumpp,” in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, ed. Joyce Nakamura,
vol. 21 , 1995, pp. 165–178
Michael Collins
