Michael S. Harper & # 8217 ; s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

Keith D. Leonard

Michael S. Harper was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Walter

Warren Harper, a postal worker, and Katherine Johnson Harper, a medical amanuensis.

Harper recalls his household & # 8217 ; s move in 1951 to a preponderantly white Los Angeles vicinity

coping with racial tenseness as a traumatic adequate experience to “ do ” him a

poet. Besides, his household had an extended record aggregation that deeply affected

Harper & # 8217 ; s poesy. Encouraged to prosecute medical specialty, Harper became merely a fringy pupil

after an asthma status kept him from take parting in a junior high gym category, which

earned him a neglecting class and kept him off the award axial rotation. At Dorsey High School in Los

Angeles, Harper was placed on the vocational path, a state of affairs his male parent had to

“ unbend out ” so that his boy could be on path toward a medical calling.

During high school, Harper avoided fixing to go a physician, and he even got

important encouragement from a college fauna professor who told him that black people

could non acquire into medical school. During his high school old ages Harper wrote a few verse forms,

but he had non yet considered authorship as an option for a calling.

In 1955, he enrolled at Los Angeles City College, and so Los Angeles State College,

which he attended until 1961, during which clip he was besides employed as a postal worker.

He says that his life began here. Many of his coworkers were educated black work forces like

Harper & # 8217 ; s male parent who had bumped against the glass ceiling of promotion in the American

workplace. Their experiences, which they shared freely, and his ain experience of

segregated lodging at the Iowa Writer & # 8217 ; s Workshop formed the foundation of Harper & # 8217 ; s

appraisal of America as a schizophrenic society. However, Harper credits his old ages at

Los Angeles State, where he read John Keats & # 8217 ; s letters and Ralph Ellison & # 8217 ; s Invisible

Man, for fixing him for the Iowa Writer & # 8217 ; s Workshop, which he began in 1961.

After a twelvemonth at that place, Harper taught at assorted schools, including Pasadena City College

( 1962 ) , Contra Costa College ( 1964-1968 ) , and California State College ( now University,

1968-1969 ) .

The lone black pupil in both his poesy and fiction categories at Iowa, Harper

encountered painter Oliver Lee Jackson, who would act upon Harper & # 8217 ; s thought. Furthermore,

he lived in unintegrated lodging, which runs counter to the democratic rules of this

state and best illustrates what Harper calls the schizophrenic disorder of this society. This thought

encompasses more than the political relations and bequest of racial segregation ; it is involved in the

really English we speak and the logic we follow. Such binary resistances as white and black,

hot and cold, set the linguistic communication against itself through a manner of believing that offprints

and opposes, contrary to what Harper sees as a holistic existence where humanity is a

contemplation of the existence, and the existence is a contemplation of humanity. This doctrine

serves as a footing for the subjects, aesthetics, and schemes of his poesy, which include

music, affinity, history, and mythology.

For Harper, history and mythology are similar in that neither is to the full constituted or

contained by its written or normally understood versions. Such mythologies as white

domination, and the scarred history it engenders, excessively rigidly encase humanity in inactive

classs. Manipulating old European and American myths and making new 1s illustrates

a end and technique Harper uses throughout his poesy, get downing with his first volume, Dear

John Dear Coltrane ( 1970 ) . In the volume, John Coltrane, who Harper knew, is both the

adult male and his wind, the gifted and tragic instrumentalist, and his wholistic worldview and

redemptional music. With an apprehension of black music similar to W. E. B. Du Bois & # 8217 ; s in

his description of the African American “ sorrow vocals, ” Harper includes the

music of poesy as similar avowal of the importance of jointing enduring to derive

from it and last it. Here, as in Harper & # 8217 ; s later volumes, musical beat replaces

traditional prosodies in the poesy without giving trade. Coltrane becomes a nexus

between the personal and historical, hurting and its look, enduring and love. To

widen these subjects, Harper devotes a subdivision of the volume to poems about his ain family,

thematically and literally personalizing history so that household ties become continuities

of humanity as they link the person with both a P

ersonal and corporate history. This

gap and imbrication of historical and personal possibility, in the context of

Harper & # 8217 ; s involvement in music, seems to supply a grip on Harper & # 8217 ; s hard and

abstract construct of musical and poetic mode.

In his subsequent volumes, Harper built upon and expanded his doctrine and repertory

of subjects and schemes. In 1971, History Is Your Oun Heartbeat garnered Harper

the Poetry Award of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. Alternatively of celebrated instrumentalists,

the volume focuses on Harper & # 8217 ; s household to research similar issues as Harper & # 8217 ; s old

volume. Following, Song: I Want a Witness ( 1972 ) uses black faith as a subtext for

its speculations on black history, while, in the 2nd subdivision, the volume duologues with

William Faulkner & # 8217 ; s short narrative “ The Bear, ” adding an component of literary

history to Harper & # 8217 ; s thematics. From this volume besides comes the limited edition Photograph:

Negatives: History as Apple Tree ( 1972 ) . Nightmare Begins Responsibility, a

volume published in 1975, is another fluctuation on the poet & # 8217 ; s doctrine of affinity,

history, the wholistic existence, and an single & # 8217 ; s duty to all of these. In

many ways, it serves as the subsequence to both Song: I Want a Witness and Debridement

( 1973 ) , and is considered Harper & # 8217 ; s richest volume. In it, Harper uses verse forms to

reference affinity in a jazz-blues parlance ; to see the decease of his friend Ralph Albert

Dickey ; to confirm responsible action, like Jackie Robinson & # 8217 ; s, in the face of a racialist

incubus ; and to set up the poet & # 8217 ; 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. Three

other volumes, Rhode Island. Eight Poems ( 1981 ) , Mending Song for the Inner Ear ( 1985 ) ,

and a limited edition entitled Songlines: Mosaics ( 1991 ) have since been published.

By the mid 1970s, Harper & # 8217 ; s repute as a poet, bookman, and instructor was steadfastly

established. Among many other awards, such as the National Institute of Arts and Letters

Creative Writing Award ( 1972 ) , a Guggenheim family ( 1976 ) , and a National Endowment

for the Arts grant ( 1977 ) , Harper received an American specializer 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 thought and authorship. Among Harper & # 8217 ; s former pupils are Gayl Jones, Melvin Dixon, and

Anthony Walton. As a bookman, Harper has made several parts, including a

coaction with Robert Stepto entitled Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American

Literature, Art, and Scholarship, an edition of Sterling A. Brown & # 8217 ; s poesy, a limited

edition of Robert Hayden & # 8217 ; s American Journal and Every Shut Eye Ain & # 8217 ; t Sleep, an

anthology of African American poesy since 1945. Harper, poet laureate of the province of

Rhode Island, is presently a professor at Brown University, where he teaches literature

and originative authorship.

See besides: John O & # 8217 ; 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. Angstrom

Gathering of African-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, erectile dysfunction.

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 African-american Culture, 1984, pp. 277-319. Joseph Brown, “ Their Long Scars

Touch Ours: A Contemplation on the Poetry of Michael Harper, ” Callaloo 9.1

( 1986 ) : 209-220. “ Michael S. Harper: American Poet, ” Callaloo 13.4 ( Fall

1990 ) : 749-829.

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L.

Andrews, French republics Foster Smith and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Copyright? 1997 by Oxford University Press.