Owning the Masters Marilyn Nelson Waniek I came of age as a reader of poetry during the early sixties; the first contemporary poet I read seriously was LeRoi Jones. I was terribly moved by his decision to write against the white literary tradition, which he so clearly loved. Jones had been a melancholy confessional Negro aesthete, confused in his identity, part of a new lost generation that called itself “Beat.” In about 1964 he changed both his name and his style and became the poet of black nationalist rage, demanding (as he put it in “Black Art”) poems like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews. Black poems to smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches whose brains are red jelly stuck between ‘lizabeth taylor’s toes... ... “poems that kill.” Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff poems for dope selling wops or slickhalfwhite politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . Setting fire and death to whities ass. Look at the Liberal Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat & puke himself into eternity . . . rrrrrrrr There’s a negroleader pinned to a bar stool in Sardi’s eyeballs melting in hot flame Another negroleader on the steps of the white house one kneeling between the sheriff’s thighs negotiating cooly for his people. Agggh. . . . stumbles across the room . . . Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked to the world! Now Amiri Baraka, Jones explained in a poem called “Jitterbugs” that he gave up on the Anglo-American literary tradition because The imperfection of the worldis a burden, if you know it, think about it, at all. Look up in the sky wishing you were free, placed so terribly in time, mind out among new stars, working propositions, and not this planet where you can’t go anywhere without an awareness of the hurt the white man has put on the people. Any people. You cant escape, there’s no where to go. They have made this star unsafe and this age, primitive, though yr mind is somewhere else, your ass aint. Though I was too timid and too thoroughly assimilated to follow Jones and other writers of the late Negro period into the literary separatism they called the Black Aesthetic, my heart went out to this struggling generation; I felt my own perhaps toned-down version of the pain of their self-seeking. But the poets of Baraka’s generation threw out the baby with the bath water. In their single-minded quest for a revolutionary poetry, they paid a great personal and artistic cost. Baraka confessed his loss in 1964, in the poem, “I Substitute for the Dead Lecturer.” Explaining that his symbolic suicide was a response to the need of the poor, he asks, What kindness What wealth can I offer? Except what is, for me, ugliest. What is for me, shadows, shriekingphantoms. He explains his sense of pained responsibility: The Lord has saved me to do this. The Lord has made me strong. I am as I must have myself. Against all thought, all music, all my soft loves. The poem ends with him fearing that his decision will drive him mad. What a deep wrenching. How can a poet survive such a radical self-amputation? How can a poet survive without tradition? In his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot says of an innovative male poet: “we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Etheridge Knight, when asked which were his favorite poets, used to ask in reply: “You mean my favorite dead white poets?” Then he would answer the question. Though I am embarrassed to ally myself with the forces of white-old-dead-boyism, I must confess that the title I have chosen for this essay led me immediately to remember some MFA students I have had who knew every poem in every book by whoever was pictured on the front page of the latest issue of The American Poetry Review, but drew a blank when I mentioned Matthew Arnold. Maybe they had read “Dover Beach” in a class once? Oh, yeah: that Matthew Arnold. Student poets whose entire sense of the tradition was drawn from The Norton Anthology, shorter edition. Student poets who were never curious, or impassioned, or even angry enough to study the corpus of a dead white male poet. Student poets who measured themselves against each other and the pages of the latest issues of one or two literary journals, instead of against the masters of our tradition. Our tradition. I say this feeling like a woman wearing an ivory necklace and a mink coat at a national convention of People for Ethical Treatment of Animals. I know, I know: The tradition is the oppressor. The tradition doesn’t include me because I’m black and a woman. If we had a time machine that could whisk us backwards, where in the world, and to what time, would the black woman choose to go? Our history has been excruciating, from enduring genital mutilation to being forced to give birth to a brutal master’s pale new slaves. The history that created the traditional canon has systematically excluded blacks and women, and a whole lot of other groups, from just about every other hierarchy of honor. All those dead white guys in the tradition: when they were alive, their people were the masters, my people were the slaves. How can I read Blake without an awareness of the black-white symbolism by which eighteenth-century Europe justified the hurt it was putting on African and American people? I knew, even as an undergraduate, that my professor was rationalizing when he explained away my question about Blake’s little black boy who says: “I am black, but 0! my soul is white.” His reply—“Oh, no, Marilyn, Blake wasn’t an unconscious racist. Great poets rise above the limitations of their times”—was cowpoop. Like everyone else, poets live first in time, heirs to the racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic, war-mongering, meat-eating, environment-destroying, whale-slaughtering, ivory-coveting, seal-pup-bashing, glorious long-gone and just-yesterday past. I cannot overlook these things. Sometimes I get so mad I want to reach into the page, grab one of those old farts by the shirt-front, and shake the bejesus out of him. Okay, Andrew Marvel!, let’s say your mistress has fainted three mornings in a row. Who is going to foot the emotional bill? I am sorry you had to wait for your turn, Mr. Milton, but my people—blacks and women—have been standing there waiting for generation upon generation upon generations. How can I read Wallace Stevens without remembering that he is said to have asked, when Gwendolyn Brooks became the first Aframerican poet to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, “Why did they let the coon in?” What about Ezra Pound? What about Philip Larkin? Minority students enrolled in or graduated from MFA programs at historically white institutions have begun to speak out, to let the academy know of their experiences. At a session at last year’s Associated Writing Programs convention, for example, several minority MFA students described being pushed by white teachers to “show us your rage.” In a poem called “Why Do So Few Blacks Study Creative Writing?” Cornelius Eady writes of the black student (the only one) in a creative writing course he is teaching, who comes to his office in tears after class one day, asking why “this poem of hers / Needed a passport, a glossary, // A disclaimer.” Eady inwardly responds, Really, what Can I say? That if she chooses To remain here the term Neighborhood will always have A foreign stress, that there Will always be the moment The small, hard details Of your life will be made To circle their wagons? No writer wants to feel that she inhabits an intellectual ghetto. But Aframerican writers do occupy an unusually cluttered landscape since they must pay attention to not one but two literary traditions. While honoring the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks, they must also honor those of the old dead white guys. We are heirs to an alternate tradition, heirs to slave narratives, spirituals, great oratory, jazz, and blues, and the once enslaved are heirs to the masters, too. Take Phillis Wheatley, a poet who owned nothing, least of all herself. Her very name is symbolic of her condition: she was called Phillis after the ship that stole her from Africa and bore her into slavery, and Wheatley after the family that the white man’s law said owned her, her labor, and all of her future generations. Her language was the language of the auction block and the pulpit; the only poetry she knew was what she found in the Wheatleys’ library, principally the works of Alexander Pope and the Bible, which allowed even such Christians as the Wheatleys to believe they could own other people with moral impunity. Like a junkyard artist, Phillis Wheatley created herself and her poetry out of the materials that came to hand. In 1767, at the age of fourteen, she addressed “The Atheist” with this pious, brilliant, misspelled argument: Muse! where shall I begin the spacious feud To tell what curses unbeleif doth yield? Thou who dost daily feel his hand, and rod Darest thou deny the Essence of a God!— If there’s no heav’n, ah! whither wilt thou go Make thy Ilysium in the shades below? If there’s no God from whom did all things Spring He made the greatest and minutest Thing Angelic ranks no less his Power display Than the least mite scarce visible to Day. This child was a slave, and to her atheism meant the complete meaninglessness of creation and of existence. Nihilism. The Great Nada. How differently the slave felt God’s hand every day than the smug, white atheist whom Phillis addressed: how easy it was for the pampered master to believe there is no better existence than this one. If the slave has no heaven to hope for, what is the use of going on? The Negro spirituals express not naiveté but desperate faith. Though Phillis Wheatley’s poems have not yet been read subtly enough, they have outlived their frail, unhappy creator by some two hundred years. This, I think, is what it means to own the masters. The Wheatleys owned Phillis, but the Wheatley name lives now only because Phillis owned it. The classical allusions, the formal distance, the form itself that she used come from the culture that enslaved her and our people. Yet she was born a poet: she found her voice within the oppressor’s tradition because she had to sing. Singing seems to me to be very much to the point here. Though we still describe it as singing, most modern white poetry emulates speech, not song. Some poets do it very well; so well, in fact, that the speech of their poems lifts on its own music. Seldom, however, does a modern poem achieve the transparency available to traditional prosody, a transparency reached by the reader when words on a page, read silently, become subvocalized song. I hesitate to become involved in the current debate between the so-called new formalists (the singers) and the organic poets (the conversationalists). I cannot in good conscience take either side. Certainly free-verse poems can sing. Yet I hear the music more clearly, more compellingly, when I write with an ear to tradition, hearing either the music of my people or the rhyme and meter of the masters’ tradition. Many of my people—blacks, women—argue that we have no place in the tradition, because it excludes us. One of their problems with tradition is their belief that writers are born into a tradition the way they are born into gender and race. If your parents were Serbs, you’re a Serb, and Serbs hate Croats. If you are a Hutu, you hate the Tutsi. It is one warlord against another out there, folks, and some of us want to play Hatfields and McCoys in the literary world. If you are a new formalist, you don’t read free verse. If you are an Aframerican woman, you don’t read Paul Celan. Elizabeth Barrett Browning says nothing to you about love if you are gay; Paradise Lost is an offense to womyn. Each group wants to redefine the tradition in its own image. They think tradition is tribal and exclusive. But Zora Neale Hurston describes as a high point of her youth her enraptured reading of Paradise Lost; Maya Angelou claims that “Shakespeare wrote for me, a poor black girl on the dirt roads of Arkansas.” And Maya is right: Shakespeare did write for her, just as I write for a fifty-one-year-old white Oklahoma farmer. Eliot too was right when he said that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” By “great labour,” of course, Eliot meant the labor of serious, scholarly reading. We now know that the labor necessary to obtain the tradition has been greater for such groups as blacks and women. For us the labor is twofold: there is the labor of studying the literature, then there is the additional labor of rising above its time-bound limitations. As Toni Morrison points out in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, we live, read, and write in a genderized, racialized world. If reading well means reading politically, conscious of the social considerations that inform any text, then those of us who come from traditions of oppression find ourselves estranged from canonical texts and must fight—against them and against our arguments with them—to possess them. Eliot writes that obtaining the tradition “involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” He saw the past as “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” The canon is steadily undergoing formation, both vertically and—more recently—horizontally. The future will applaud our generation’s widening of the stream. We must not, however, as we widen the course of the canon, make its bed shallow. Despite the labor necessary to appreciate them, those dead white guys are great. Sometimes in spite of themselves. Sometimes, I suspect, not even knowing, before they wrote the work, the truth the work reveals. Too often we ignore the fact that tradition is process. Believing that tradition is created in retrospect, we search tirelessly for the great but unpublished black lesbian poet of the seventeenth century. Perhaps someday someone will find her, and that discovery will force us to make new maps of the literary landscape. What will be changed, however, is not the landscape of the seventeenth century, but that of the generation that discovers her. For tradition, as process, is formed as we go forward. There is no doubling back, no taking that other fork in the road, no rewinding the tape. Some politically correct textbook editors have wanted to rewind and edit the tape, banning, for instance, the use of the word slave, preferring instead the term enslaved person. But no amount of sensitivity to hurt feelings will erase the fact that the slavery of Africans played an essential role in the history and psychology of the New World—as did, we must also admit, the genocidal wars against Red injuns, or Indians, or American Indians, or Native Americans, or natives. As did the white man’s war against the natural world. It has to do with time: our tradition is what we inherit, not what we create. Perhaps the tradition we pass on will be superior to the one that got dumped into our laps; at least it will be different. Our tradition is our shared understanding of encoded meanings, the history of our words. I am reminded of my reaction to a poem by Galway Kinnell, in which he describes driving home past landmarks, one of which is the place where he once saw a fox. Words have histories—like Kinnell’s landmark, like the farm I drive past regularly, where I once saw a fox years ago and thought of Kinnell’s poem. I think of the fox and of Kinnell’s poem every time I drive by the place. Words have histories like that. Our understanding of figurative language has a great deal to do with our sense of word-history. You have to know what a bull is and be familiar with the saying, “a bull in a china shop,” to understand this simple metaphorical insult: “Well, I wouldn’t want him in my china shop.” I recently read that in one Chinese dialect, the word for so-so means literally horse-horse, tiger-tiger. There must be word-histories echoing there that native speakers understand. Words mean in echoes that are derived from both their synchronic and their diachronic references, both their horizontal and their vertical connotations, both their present and their past meanings. Tradition is the living Oxford English Dictionary from which we derive our ability to receive a metaphor or decode a symbol. From which we derive many of the pleasures of poetry. I don’t believe the pleasures of poetry can be dissected and explained, but one of them must surely be its ability to give us a sense of community: as we think along with someone else, the boundaries between two minds come down. Form itself is communal; it is, as Thomas B. Byers writes, “one of the ways in which the poem participates in poetic, social, and historical dialogue.” So a poem written with an ear to tradition enables us to think and sing along with many other minds, to join a sort of intergenerational, silent, interior Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I am convinced that our inclination to create race-, gender-, and ethnic-specific literary enclaves is dangerous, that it disinvites us from community. The Anglo-American tradition belongs to all of us, or should, as does the community into which the tradition invites us. That means the metrical tradition, too. For many of today’s poets, the metrical tradition is a prison and writing in verse is a drudgery, like extra homework. For them, form is a straitjacket and metrical language is as stiff as starch. Most of us have lost what Alan Shapiro calls “an instinctive sense of the delicate and subtle tensions between stress and accent, rhythm and meter, repetition and surprise, which the best poems in the tradition illustrate.” Yes, writing in traditional form is taxing. But it is also liberating. To describe the freedom it bestows, I will jump to another art—music—and a long passage about musical composition written by Igor Stravinsky: The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free. As for myself, I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me. . . . Will I then have to lose myself in this abyss of freedom? . However, I shall not succumb. I shall overcome my terror and shall be reassured by the thought that I have the seven notes of the scale and its chromatic intervals at my disposal, that strong and weak accents are within my reach, and that in all of these I possess solid and concrete elements which offer me a field of experience just as vast as the upsetting and dizzy infinitude that had just frightened me. . . . My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even farther: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. . . . The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” writes Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider. But why should we dismantle the house? Why toss the baby over the porch railing, with its bathful of soapy water? Why don’t we instead take possession of, why don’t we own, the tradition? Own the masters, all of them. Wordsworth and Wheatley, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden. As we own the masters and learn to use more and more levels of this language we love, for whose continued evolution we share responsibility, the signifiers become ours. We must not stand, like trembling slaves, at the back door of the master’s house. We must recognize, as Cornelius Eady does in a poem called “Gratitude,” that “1 am a brick in a house I that is being built / around your house.” One of my colleagues, Herbert Lederer, retired from the German Department of the University of Connecticut a few years ago. I went to his retirement party, not because I knew him well, but because we had been saying hello to each other in the hall every day for years, and he seemed nice. I learned from the testimonial speeches that Herr Lederer, who organized a German language choir every Christmas, who staged his own adaptations of classics of German literature, who spearheaded the annual Christkindlmarkt in the Student Union Ballroom (modeled after those that take place in the center squares of many German cities during the Christmas season)—that this Herr Lederer, rosy-cheeked and jolly as a Bavarian baker, was a German-born Jew. I learned that he had escaped from Nazi Germany as a university student, and that he had resolved, as news of the Holocaust leaked out, not to give up his study of German literature. To give it up, he reasoned, would have been to give in to the Nazis who declared Jews unworthy of it. To study it, to teach it, to love it, was to keep it out of Nazi hands. It was to own it. Other writers make our work possible; we write someone else’s words, which is exactly what T. S. Eliot was talking about. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes this layering of meaning upon meaning as it appears in the Aframerican tradition as signifying. In signifying, a word becomes “double-voiced” and “decolonized.” Signifying, argues Gates, fundamentally alters our reading of the tradition. Owning the masters of our tradition, “signifying,” paying due homage, gives us a way to escape the merely personal, puts us in dialogue with great thoughts of the past, and teaches us transparency. For the greatest masters of our tradition sought not to see their own eyes, but to see through them. Marilyn Nelson Waniek was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1946. She was raised on military bases and as a poet developed a unique perspective on the U.S. Armed Services as the daughter of one of the last of the Tuskegee Airmen. She earned her BA from the University of California at Davis, her MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and her PhD from the University of Minnesota. Her books include For the Body (1978); Mama’s Promises (1985); The Homeplace (1990), which won the Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and the PEN Winship Award; and Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. She has written two collections of poetry for children. Her other honors include two Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and has taught most recently at the University of Delaware. “Owning the Masters” was presented as a George Ellison Memorial Lecture at the University of Cincinnati in June of 1994. “Owning the Masters” appears in our Spring 1995 issue.