EMANUEL, James A(ndrew, Sr.)

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Nationality: American. Born: Alliance, Nebraska, 15 June 1921. Education: Alliance High School, 1935–39; Howard University, Washington, D.C., 1946–50, B.A. (summa cum laude) 1950; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 1950–53, M.A. 1953; Columbia University, New York, 1953–62, Ph.D. 1962. Military Service: 93rd Infantry Division, U.S. Army, 1944–46: Sergeant; Army Commendation Ribbon. Family: Married Mattie Johnson in 1950 (divorced 1974); one son (deceased 1983). Career: Canteen steward, Civilian Conservation Corps, Wellington, Kansas, 1939–40; elevator operator, Des Moines, Iowa, 1940–41; weighmaster, Rock Island, Illinois, 1941–42; confidential secretary, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. War Department, Washington, D.C. 1942–44; civilian chief, Pre-Induction Section, Army and Air Force Induction Station, Chicago, 1950–53; instructor, Harlem YWCA Business School, New York, 1954–56; instructor, 1957–62, assistant professor, 1962–70, associate professor, 1970–72, and professor of English, 1973–84, City College of New York; Fulbright Professor of American Literature, University of Grenoble, 1968–69, and University of Warsaw, 1975–76; visiting professor of American Literature, University of Toulouse, 1971–73, 1979–81. General Editor, Broadside Critics Series, Detroit, 1969–75. Awards: John Hay Whitney fellowship, 1952, 1953; Saxton memorial fellowship, 1964; Black American Literature Forum Special Distinction award (for poetry), 1978. Address: B.P. 339, 75266 Paris Cedex 06, France.

Publications

Poetry

The Treehouse and Other Poems. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1968.

At Bay. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1969.

Panther Man. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1970.

Black Man Abroad: The Toulouse Poems. Detroit, Lotus Press, 1978.

A Chisel in the Dark: Poems, Selected and New. Detroit, Lotus Press, 1980.

A Poet's Mind. New York, Regents, 1983.

The Broken Bowl: New and Uncollected Poems. Detroit, Lotus Press, 1983.

Deadly James and Other Poems. Detroit, Lotus Press, 1987.

The Quagmire Effect. Paris, American College, 1988.

Whole Grain: Collected Poems, 1958–1989. Detroit, Lotus Press, 1991.

De la rage au coeur, bilingual with French translations by Jean Migrenne. Thaon, France, Amiot Lenganey, 1992.

Blues in Black and White, with Godelieve Simons. Brussels, Belgium, privately printed, 1992.

Reaching for Mumia: 16 Haiku. Paris, L'insomniaque éditeur, 1995.

JAZZ from the Haiku King. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1999.

Recordings: The Treehouse and Other Poems, Broadside Voices, 1968; Panther Man, Broadside Voices, 1970.

Other

Langston Hughes. New York, Twayne, 1967.

How I Write 2, with MacKinlay Kantor and Lawrence Osgood. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1972.

Editor, with Theodore L. Gross, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America. New York, Free Press, 1968.

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Manuscript Collection: Jay B. Hubbell Center, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Critical Studies: In Road Apple Review (Oshkosh, Wisconsin), Winter 1971–72; "James A. Emanuel: The Perilous Stairs," in Caliban (Toulouse, France), 12, 1976, and "Black Man Abroad: James A. Emanuel," in Black American Literature Forum (Terre Haute, Indiana), Fall 1979, both by Marvin Holdt; Black American Poetry: A Critical Commentary by Ann Semel and Kathleen Mullen, New York, Monarch Press, 1977; La Rive Noire: De Harlem à la Seine by Michel Fabre, Paris, Lieu Commun, 1985; "A Poet's Self: Restructuring the Fragments" by Anthony Suter, in Caliban (Toulouse, France), 23, 1986; "James Emanuel: A Poet in Exile" by Michael Fabre, in his From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1991; "Sanctuary" by Toni Y. Joseph, in One Voice, Dallas, The Dallas-Fort Worth Association of Black Communicators, 1994.

James A. Emanuel comments:

(1974) Some of the personal history and many of the ideas reflected in my poetry can be found in my contribution to the book How I Write 2. By now writing poetry is my principal method of finding and expressing what life means. From the time that I began to write poetry steadily, in the late 1950s, the exacting labor and the large mysteries of that activity—usually carried on late at night—have centered upon vital, everyday matters. The categories into which my poems can be divided describe areas of experience and thought with which ordinary men are well acquainted, and I have wanted my poetry to be fundamentally clear to the largest possible audience. Recurrent subjects are youth (centrally my son, James) and miscellaneous black experience; other subjects include writers, anti-Semitism, blues, war, etc. The lyrics continue philosophical, descriptive, and personal themes. The tone is usually serious, sometimes satirical, once in a while humorous; the form varies from strict sonnets to free verse that attempts to catch nuances of black American speech patterns that might be heard on a Harlem street. My poetry runs roughly parallel to my life: a movement from the reflective traditional to the compressed tensions of the 1970s, with inevitably special emphasis on racism but also with constantly interspersed lyrics that have little to do with our perilous decades. Thus I hope that my poetry, in its unplanned evolution and variety, attests the crucial, dual role of the black poet: to struggle as embroiled man but to reflect as clear mind; to denude and expose as destroyer yet to clothe and grace as creator; to live as black and therefore made for the wide world yet American and therefore made for the narrow cauldron that our nation has become.

My latest work, especially "The Toulouse Poems" and generally those written in and after 1972, might well suggest that three loves develop in my work: parental, racial, and romantic. These common passions are the staple of my poetry. Trying to fathom them and to transform them into art, I am content to be judged by that mass of readers who feel as strongly as they think and who are drawn to what I want increasingly to keep in my poetry: the bite and song of reality.

(1980) Reviewing my poems written recently in London and Paris, I find experiments with antirealism coming into my work, perhaps as an intensification of my grappling with such subjects as tyranny, art, and time.

(1995) Having published my first college poem almost fifty years ago, I have a long backward glance covering facts that would crowd this entry: my poems in over 120 anthologies; M.A. theses on them; thirty-odd years of public readings of them; translations of them; art exhibits abroad with American and foreign artists' work based on them; radio discussions of them on France Culture's Panorama program; my public launching of my new creations, "jazz haiku" and "blues haiku," in 1993; my life and works treated in fifty reference books; my fourteen awards from international biographical centers in the past four years; and my university-archived autobiographies, From the Bad Lands to the Capital (1943–44) and Snowflakes and Steel: My Life as a Poet, 1971–1980 (1981).

Yet, as C. Day Lewis suggested in his preface to the first edition of Contemporary Poets, perhaps 10 percent, perhaps only 1 percent, of us in this book will survive as "names" in poetry. Our lifetime facts, like mine above, will disappear if not steadily absorbed into remembered, reread poems. Since this absorption occurs outside the powers of us who are neither leaders nor wheelhorses in the fields where literary reputations are raised, we have placed our hopes on durable themes and proven craftsmanship.

The 215 poems in my collection Whole Grain (1991) reveal at least twenty-one large thematic categories, none foretelling my innovative jazz and blues forms. My innumerable poem drafts record my craving for the exact word, the breathing image, the pared-down line, the harnessed rhythm. These hard demands are matched in sincerity by my hope that critics worth their salt will follow the lead of Marvin Holdt, Anthony Suter, and Michel Fabre in France, the efforts of Douglas Watson and James de Jongh in the U.S.A., by searching the substance and methods of my best poems, which I have labeled in my files as "the top ten percent." Going that far, may they go farther.

(2000) As this third millennium begins, my hindsight should have the merit of age, and my foresight risks little. After over forty years of publishing, I believe that my best contributions to prose are Langston Hughes (1967) and my later essays on that author; Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America (1968), done with Theodore Gross; and "A Force in the Field," in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 18 (1994). I think, then, that my critical faculties, my comprehension of the accomplishments of my brother-writers, and my grasp of the meaning of my own life have been well-recorded.

Nothing remains as a hard literary task except the extended expression of my force as a poet, largely with the expected creative collaboration (in art-plus-poetry books) of Godelieve Simons of Brussels, the authority on women engravers in her country.

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James A. Emanuel's sympathies are clear even without his statement in Panther Man that young people are "the only people whom I tend to respect as a group." Poems like "A Clown at Ten," "The Young Ones, Flip Side," "Fourteen," "Sixteen, Yeah," and "Fisherman" celebrate with an understanding smile the passion and energy of youth while they steer clear of Housmanian idolatry and pathos. Young adulthood is pain, punching, and confusion for the poet, the hopeful stage through which the world passes to confrontation. Behind it stretches the prelapsarian vista of childhood. The poet captures the antics of the bathtub sailor in "The Voyage of Jimmy Poo," a time of sterling memory in "I Wish I Had a Red Balloon," and the joy of answering children's questions in "For the 4th Grade, Prospect School: How I Became a Poet."

Manhood brings a different order: understanding, rebellion, militancy, anguish, and death. "Emmett Till," "Where Will Their Names Go Down," and "For Malcolm, U.S.A." pay tribute to the victims, while "Panther Man," "Animal Tricks," "Crossover: for RFK," and "Black Man, 13th Floor" speak in strident—sometimes black and idiomatic—tones of the growth of a generation of men who are rising to take control.

Surrounding and undergirding all stages, however, is the essential romantic humanism of the poet. "Nightmare" and "Christ, One Morning" let us know that all is in the hands of man; there is no God who can be trusted. Ceaselessly, Emanuel reaffirms the power of the imaginative intellect to scale the heights of its own tree house and to dream ("A Negro Author" and "The Treehouse") or to bring the authoritarian assumptions of the world down with a wince ("Black Poet on the Firing Range"). The poems from Toulouse show a sweep and maturity that combine this essential vision with a firm formal mastery.

—Houston A. Baker, Jr.