Plain Spoken is a new monthly column on literature and the Midwest.
Today’s readers tend to associate poetry with the intense evocation of an individual speaker’s thoughts and feelings. Poems are short, usually no more than a few pages. They entail the cultivation of a distinct poetic “voice.” They put language to the otherwise private domain of the poet’s mental life. In doing so, they forge a personal connection between poet and reader. They are emotional without being embarrassed about it, and they use language in idiosyncratic ways unavailable to ordinary speech. In T.S. Eliot’s phrase, poems perform “raids on the inarticulate.”
Though Eliot was himself not an especially lyrical poet, the poetic traits I am describing are closely associated with “the lyric” as a category of poetry. The poetry critic Virginia Jackson has used the term “lyricization” to describe the historical process by which people came to equate lyric poetry with poetry in general. When lyricization occurs, we might undervalue “non-lyric” kinds of poetry, and overlook other functions that poetry can serve.
One valuable function of poetry is the preservation of history, through the documentation of specific events as well as ways of life. Quite a few 20th century poets did this in different ways. In the 1930s, Muriel Rukeyser interviewed West Virginia coal miners about the fatal Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster for her Book of the Dead (1938), a volume of poetry which doubles as investigative journalism.
In the 1960s and ’70s, counterculture rocker (and Kansas City native) Ed Sanders — the founding editor of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts — exhorted young writers to practice “investigative poetry.” Refuting the stereotype of a scatterbrained New Left reveling in chaos for its own sake, Sanders insisted that no poet of the modern age could be properly tuned in to the Real without an amply cross-tabulated filing cabinet. Poets ought to be muckrakers, preternaturally suspicious sorts, not unlike the hippie detective Doc Sportello in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. (Pynchon calls him a “gumsandal” detective.)
“[T]he way of Historical Poesy,” Sanders warned with all the special flair of that era, “is mined with danger, especially to those bards who would seek to drag the corpses of J.P. Morgan’s neo-confederates through the amphetamine piranha tank.”
But before these “documentary” poets, there was James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938).
What leaps out at you about the Black intellectual establishment from Johnson’s heyday of the 1920s and ’30s is that everyone involved — from NAACP leader Johnson, to W.E.B. Du Bois, to the power couple Paul and Eslanda Robeson — seem to have been in a competition to see who could be the most polymathic. Johnson alone was a lawyer, editor, Tin Pan Alley songwriter, poet, novelist, ethnomusicologist and civil rights leader, as well as a U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, Panama and Nicaragua.
As a songwriter, Johnson is best remembered for “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the unofficial “Black national anthem,” as well as for the spiritual “Dem Bones,” a secularized version of which is known to millions of American schoolchildren: “the foot bone’s connected to the — heel bone,” etc.
It’s a scandal that, in spite of his virtuosity and influence, no scholarly biography exists of Johnson, so far as I can tell.
God’s Trombones (1927), Johnson’s best-known poetic work, is a series of seven verse “sermons” with an opening “prayer.” The sermons seek to replicate in writing the oratorical style, as well as the content, of Black preachers in African-American churches.
In Johnson’s telling, the volume has a Midwestern origin story. As part of his duties as Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Johnson embarked on a national speaking tour, many of his audiences church congregations. In Kansas City, after a long day of leapfrogging from pulpit to pulpit, an exhausted Johnson was cajoled by his staff into attending one last meeting, well after 9 p.m. From the platform, Johnson gave attention — first drowsily, then with exhilaration — to a “famed visiting preacher.”
He started intoning the old folk sermon that begins with the creation of the world and ends with Judgment Day. He was at once a changed man, free, at ease and masterful. The change in the congregation was instantaneous. An electric current ran through the crowd. […] He strode the pulpit up and down in what was actually a very rhythmic dance, and he brought into play the full gamut of his wonderful voice, a voice — what shall I say? — not of an organ or a trumpet, but rather of a trombone, the instrument possessing above all others the power to express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice…
Then and there, on a sheet of scrap paper, Johnson first began work on the book.
In regional terms, Johnson the person is chiefly associated with the American South and New York City. Even so, as the scholar Noelle Morrissette writes, “God’s Trombones was created out of regional, North-South-Midwest travel,” which enabled Johnson to serve as a “culture-gatherer” in his creative work. The Black expression Johnson sought to honor extended to Midwestern cities and towns, from Kansas City to Chicago to Gary, Indiana — and perhaps to the multiple Black churches of Buxton, Iowa, the mining town that the author Rachelle Chase has termed the “Black utopia” of early 20th century Iowa. (The last mine in Buxton closed in 1927, the year of God’s Trombones.)
Johnson saw Black preaching as a linguistically and choreographically complicated artistic tradition, and one that was relatively stable over time. Johnson “remember[ed] hearing” in his Florida childhood “sermons that were current, sermons that passed with only slight modifications from preacher to preacher and from locality to locality.” Johnson describes the register of “the old-time sermon” as “a fusion of Negro idioms with Bible English; and in this there may have been, after all, some kinship with the innate grandiloquence of their old African tongues.” The preacher’s performance is as much bodily as rhetorical, and demands control of movement, posture, gesticulation, vocal modulation and the knack for playing off an audience.
In each sermon, Johnson attempts to reproduce the rhythms and timing of the spoken word through a combination of line breaks and em-dashes (—). Johnson notes that the dashes are meant to indicate not just any pause, but “a certain sort of pause that is marked by a quick intaking and an audible expulsion of the breath.” In this, perhaps, Johnson joins the dash-happy Emily Dickinson in American poetry’s heightening of that punctuation mark, otherwise so humbly horizontal.
Unsurprisingly, the subjects of such sermons were scriptural: the first two chapters of Genesis, Noah and the Ark, the Crucifixion, etc. These are among the subjects Johnson chooses for God’s Trombones. The book’s finale is a retelling of the apocalyptic “Valley of Dry Bones” passage from the Book of Ezekiel — of which “Dem Bones” is an earlier and more playful adaptation by Johnson. The most well-known poem in the book is the Genesis 1 sermon, “The Creation.” The poem is frequently anthologized, and also gets recited by Charles Lampkin in the Cold War nuclear paranoia chiller Five (1951). In the poem, the creation’s sixth day reads:
Then God raised his arm and he waved his hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And he said: Bring forth! Bring forth!
And quicker than God could drop his hand,
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said: That’s good!
The passage is magnificently technical without showing off. “And split the air with their wings”: hear how the “split,” hesitating “the air” is transformed into a unified and confident “their” as the neophyte flyers find, or more accurately lose, their footing at time’s dawn. Both variants are helpfully followed by the alliterative “w” to flag the line’s musical repetition with a difference.
I am personally also fond of the poem on “The Prodigal Son,” wherein the eponymous scapegrace cuts a path to “Babylon, Babylon,/That great city of Babylon,” dissipates himself in gambling and concupiscence (“Oh, the women of Babylon!”), and winds up “broke and ragged”:
Then the young man joined another crowd—
The beggars and lepers of Babylon. […]
He got down on his belly in the mire and the mud
And ate the husks with the hogs.
And not a hog was too low to turn up his nose
At the man in the mire of Babylon.
I suspect the fall from opulence to sub-hog pauperdom plays on the then-novel idiom “high on the hog.” But regardless of that, there’s no room for doubt about Babylon’s alter ego in the poem, thanks to the poem’s paired illustration by the great muralist (and Kansas native) Aaron Douglas. The Babylonian gambling den of today is the urban, one suspects Manhattanite, cabaret:
The comparison is also made in Langston Hughes’s “Jazzonia,” published the year before God’s Trombones in The Weary Blues (1926), via the title’s portmanteau of “jazz” and “Babylonia”: “In a Harlem cabaret / Six long-headed jazzers play. / A dancing girl whose eyes are bold / Lifts high a dress of silken gold.”
In light of its channeling of world cultural currents through the medium of the preacher’s individual talent, Johnson saw the Black homiletic tradition as a contribution to what UNESCO would now call the “intangible cultural heritage” of humanity. From the perch of cosmopolitan Harlem, where Johnson lived while writing God’s Trombones, this heritage was felt to be quickly shifting or perhaps disappearing. The feeling was owed in part to the changes to Black life brought by the Great Migration, as well as the nation’s rapid technological modernization — a modernization reflected, for example, in the hot-cakes sales figures of phonograph recordings of sermons by traveling Black preachers, such as the Reverend J.M. Gates.
It was in this context that Johnson, who had just collaborated with his brother J. Rosamond Johnson on the similarly conservatory Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), was inspired with an ethnographic impulse. The impulse was shared by fellow Harlem Renaissance figures Zora Neale Hurston and Eslanda Goode Robeson, both trained anthropologists. (Hurston studied Haitian vodou and recorded American folklore for the Federal Writers’ Project.) Though Johnson was not an anthropologist like Hurston and Robeson, God’s Trombones also trains an anthropological ear on its subjects. As Johnson closes the “Preface” to God’s Trombones: “The old-time Negro preacher is rapidly passing. I have here tried sincerely to fix something of him.”
Its desire to document a social reality with ethnographic fidelity makes God’s Trombones a precursor to the documentary poets of later generations. And its desire to adapt an oral, public art form to the relative intimacy of the printed page makes the book’s sermons refreshingly non-“lyric,” in the terms discussed at the outset. Johnson’s goal is not the lyric poet’s raid on the inarticulate through the rarefied use of private language, but the print adaptation of eloquence which was already extant, steadily molded through the undersung folk use of public language. This is the poetic program of an institutional man — as Johnson surely was. And Johnson’s institutionally funded junket, from Harlem to Kansas City and back, yielded poetry readers can not only learn by heart, but learn from.
