{"id":163555,"date":"2023-03-13T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2023-03-13T14:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=163555"},"modified":"2023-03-13T11:17:26","modified_gmt":"2023-03-13T15:17:26","slug":"the-blk-mind-is-a-continuous-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/03\/13\/the-blk-mind-is-a-continuous-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blk Mind Is\u00a0a\u00a0Continuous Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph by Thomas Bresson, licensed under CC BY 4.0<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In his poem \u201cAfter Avery R. Young,\u201d the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning poet Jericho Brown writes, “The blk mind \/ Is a continuous mind.” These lines emerge for me as a guiding principle\u2014as a mantra, even\u2014when I consider the work of Black poetry in America, which insists upon the centrality of Black lives to the human story, and offers the terms of memory, music, conscience, and imagination that serve to counteract the many erasures and distortions riddling the prevailing narrative of Black life in this country. Indeed, Black poets help us to consider our past, present, and future not as disparate fragments on a disappearing trail, but rather as a single, emphatic unity: the Was<\/em>, Is<\/em>, and Ever-Shall-Be <\/em>of Black presence and consciousness.<\/p>\n

The blk mind is a continuous mind<\/em>. And language is one site where the continuum of Black life can be perceived, where we can hear ourselves talking to one another across generations, landscapes, and the particularities of circumstance. Indeed, Black poets also hurl their voices across other types of borders to remind us that we are living, sighing, and singing in harmony with others elsewhere and with traditions beyond our own.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I hear a glimmer of this border-spanning continuity in \u201cDunbar,\u201d Anne Spencer\u2019s 1922 homage to the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar:<\/p>\n

Ah, how poets sing and die!
\nMake one song and Heaven takes it;
\nHave one heart and Beauty breaks it;
\nChatterton, Shelley, Keats and I\u2014
\nAh, how poets sing and die!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the poem, Spencer, speaking as Dunbar, forgoes the Southern Black dialect with which the Black bard is famously associated, for which he was frequently criticized, and to which he sometimes felt uncomfortably obliged. Instead, she aligns him with the idealism, vulnerability, and uncontested authority of England\u2019s Romantic poets. In fact, Spencer\u2019s poem doesn\u2019t bother to argue for Dunbar\u2019s ascension to the Western literary canon; its penultimate line goes so far as to position him firmly within it. In so doing, perhaps the poem seeks not so much to liberate Dunbar from the \u201cone song\u201d or \u201cone heart\u201d of his commitment to Black life, but to remind us that Chatterton, Shelley, and Keats were, similarly, poets of single-minded focus and commitment.<\/p>\n

Just as Spencer toggles the frame through which a reader regards Dunbar, the anthology\u00a0Minor Notes<\/em> (edited by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy) invites us to listen anew to voices often occluded by our fixation upon the \u201cheadliners\u201d of African American poetry. When I do, I am reminded that the conversation in which Black poets are currently engaged, in the turbulent first quarter of the twenty-first century, began generations and centuries ago when our forebears brought poetic language to the task of pondering and protesting the elusive nature of freedom. George Moses Horton\u2019s apostrophe to the elements in \u201cPraise of Creation\u201d includes these lines addressed to the thunder:<\/p>\n

Responsive thunders roll,
\nLoud acclamations sound,
\nAnd show your Maker\u2019s vast control
\nO\u2019er all the worlds around.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Almost two centuries later, Tyehimba Jess\u2019s poem \u201cWhat the Wind, Rain, and Thunder Said to Tom\u201d seems to meet Horton\u2019s call with a corresponding response, this time addressed from the elements to mankind:<\/p>\n

Become your own full sky. Own
\nevery damn sound that struts through your ears.
\nShove notes in your head till they bust out where
\nyour eyes supposed to shine. Cast your lean
\nbrightness across the world and folk will stare<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why is the Black mind a continuous mind? Because the work of freedom is slow. Therefore, our voices must be ever resourceful, traveling forward and backward in time, lending themselves to and beyond our own age in an ongoing collective undertaking.<\/p>\n

I like to believe that Gwendolyn Brooks\u2019s 1968 poem \u201cThe Second Sermon on the Warpland,\u201d in commanding \u201cLive! \/ and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind,\u201d is seeking in part to tend to and bolster the beleaguered spirit that calls out from Fenton Johnson\u2019s \u201cSong of the Whirlwind\u201d:<\/p>\n

Oh, my soul is in the whirlwind,
\nI am dying in the valley,
\nOh, my soul is in the whirlwind
\nAnd my bones are in the valley<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Angelina Weld Grimk\u00e9\u2019s early-twenties anti-lynching sonnet, \u201cTrees,\u201d seems also to be directly invoked or reactivated by Brooks\u2019s 1957 poem \u201cThe Chicago Defender <\/em>Sends a Man to Little Rock,\u201d written to mark the backlash, in Little Rock, Arkansas, against the desegregating presence of the Little Rock Nine. Grimk\u00e9\u2019s poem closes with the following sestet:<\/p>\n

Yet here amid the wistful sounds of leaves,
\nA black-hued gruesome something swings and swings,
\nLaughter it knew and joy in little things
\nTill man\u2019s hate ended all. \u2014And so man weaves.
\nAnd God, how slow, how very slow weaves He\u2014
\nWas Christ Himself not nail\u00e8d to a tree?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As if to underscore Grimk\u00e9\u2019s impatience at the slow, slow weaving of both man and God, Brooks\u2019s final lines veer toward the imagery and rhythm of Grimk\u00e9\u2019s\u2014though perhaps her shortened meter is also an attempt to accelerate the pace of redress:<\/p>\n

I saw a bleeding brownish boy. . . .<\/p>\n

The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.<\/p>\n

The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These and other correspondences between poets and across time periods remind me that Black poetry has long occupied itself with the essential work of stewarding a people\u2014and perhaps all <\/em>people\u2014into the light of freedom. It is a labor of necessity, a struggle under burden. It is also the glorious work of seeding the future.<\/p>\n

The blk mind is a continuous mind. <\/em>Black poets must be awake to their time, attuned to the past, and\u2014in the words of the poet and educator David Wadsworth Cannon, Jr., who was published only posthumously at the behest of family and friends\u2014ever yearning out toward \u201cthe pulse of aeons yet to be.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nFrom the foreword to <\/em>Minor Notes: Vol. 1<\/a>, edited by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, to be published by Penguin Classics in April.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Tracy K. Smith is the author of the memoir<\/em> Ordinary Light, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, as well as four books of poetry<\/em>. Eternity, her selected poems, was short-listed for the Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes. Smith served two terms as the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States, appointed by the Library of Congress.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhy is the Black mind a continuous mind? Because the work of freedom is slow.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2198,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[26254,26759,67827,19720],"class_list":["post-163555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-african-american-literature","tag-being-black-in-america","tag-featured","tag-tracy-k-smith"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Blk Mind Is\u00a0a\u00a0Continuous Mind by Tracy K. Smith<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 13, 2023 \u2013 \u201cWhy is the Black mind a continuous mind? 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