JAMES A. EMANUEL
African American “Wild West” Poet Par Excellence now living in
James A. Emanuel, 1999
photo: Godelieve Simons
Reared in the “Wild West” of
the USA; earned Columbia University doctorate; had professorships in New York,
France, and Poland; published 345-plus poems (in 13 individual books, 145 or
more anthologies, and many journals); 32 literary essays; a now-classic
anthology; an autobiography; a pioneer book on Langston Hughes; book reviews
(some in The New York Times) and a CD
(poetry with saxophone accompaniment).
In 1992, created a new
literary genre, jazz-and-blues haiku, later read often, with musical
background, in Europe and Africa (efforts basing the Sidney Bechet Creative
Award given him in 1996).
During 1995-2000, placed at
least 6,000 documents in his The James A. Emanuel Papers in The Library of
Congress, Manuscript Division,
JAMES
EMANUEL- Interviewed from France!
http://www.sursumcorda.com/omniversica/songs/omniversica2.ram
(You will need RealPlayer if you do not have it.)
BOOKS OF POETRY:
The Treehouse and Other Poems (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968)
Panther Man (Broadside, 1970)
Black Man Abroad: The Toulouse Poems (Detroit: Lotus Press, 1978, ISBN: 0-916418-16-2)
A Chisel in the Dark (Poems: Selected and New) (Lotus, 1980, ISBN: 0-916418-22-7)
A Poet’s Mind (New York: Regents Publishing Company, Inc., 1983, ISBN: 0-88345-497-1)
The Broken Bowl (New and Uncollected Poems) (Lotus, 1983, ISBN: 0-916418-42-1)
Deadly James and Other Poems (Lotus, 1987, ISBN: 0-916418-67-7)
The Quagmire Effect (Paris: American College in Paris, 1988)
Whole Grain: Collected Poems, 1958-1989 (Lotus, 1991, ISBN: 0-916418-79-0)
De la Rage au Coeur, French versions trans. Jean Migrenne (Thaon, France: Amiot. Lenganey, 1992)
Blues in Black and White, with Godelieve Simons (Brussels: privately printed, 1992, ISBN: 2-909033-11-2)
Reaching for Mumia: 16 Haiku (Paris: L’insomniaque, 1995)
JAZZ from the Haiku King, poems in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian [translations] with artwork by Godelieve Simons (Broadside, 1999, ISBN: 0-940713-14-4)
The Force and the Reckoning, poetry plus autobiography, 59 photos, travel notes, bibliography (Lotus, 2001, ISBN: 0-916418-88-X)
Books may be ordered on the Internet from:
BARNES & NOBLE: http://www.bn.com/ & http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?userid=522LBQVCBS&ATH=JAMES+A.+EMANUEL
Amazon Books: http://www.amazon.com & http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/002-8086842-9745608
OTHER BOOKS:
Langston Hughes, Twayne’s United States Authors Series, No. 123 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1967, ISBN: 0-8057-0388-8), republished in Twayne’s United States Authors on CD-ROM;
Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, ed. with Theodore L. Gross (New York: The Free Press, 1968, ISBN: 0-02-0909540-9) (General Editor) “Broadside Critics Series” (books on African American poetry by Don L. Lee [Haki R. Madhubuti], Addison Gayle, Bernard W. Bell, Houston A. Baker, William H. Robinson) (Broadside, 1971-75); How I Write / 2, with MacKinlay Kantor and Lawrence Osgood (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, ISBN: 0-15-312333-8)
ESSAYS IN BOOKS AND JOURNALS:
32, among them the following titles (abbreviated references):
“Emersonian Virtue: A Definition,” American Speech (1961)
“Langston Hughes’ First Short Story: ‘Mary Winosky’”, Phylon (1961)
“‘Soul’ in the Works of Langston Hughes”, Negro Digest (1967)
“The Literary Experiments of Langston Hughes”, CLA Journal (1968)
“Fever and Feeling: Notes on the Imagery in Native Son”, Negro Digest (1968)
“America Before 1950: Black Writers’ Views”, Negro Digest (1969)
“Blackness Can: A Quest for Aesthetics”, The Black Aesthetic 1971)
“Christ in Alabama: Religion in the Poetry of Langston Hughes”, Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (1973)
“Racial Fire in the Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar”, A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1975)
“Renaissance Sonneteers”, Black World
(1975)
«Poésie noire pour un siècle nouveau», La Traductiere (1990) Poésie … siècle
«Entre bruit et silence: le poète», Sources (1997) poète
“Crossing the Musical Bridge: a Poet’s Collaborations with Musicians,” Anglophone / Caliban 11 (2002)
BOOK REVIEWS:
On Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, June Jordan, Charles W. Chesnutt, Peter Ustinov, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lance Jeffers, Naomi Long Madgett, Hortense Calisher, John Berryman, Maxwell Geismar, Gay Wilson Allen, John Figueroa, and others
ART EXHIBITS:
Poems in 36 exhibits, 1991-2000, mostly collaborations with Belgian artist Godelieve Simons, in France, Belgium, Scotland, the USA, Italy, and Brazil
RECORDINGS:
The Treehouse and Other Poems (1968), first of the Broadside Voices series of tapes of “poets reading their own books, in signed editions limited to 50 copies” (Detroit: Broadside)
Panther Man (1970), Broadside Voices series
Middle Passage (2001), CD of his reading 42 of his poems, accompanied by saxophonist Noah Howard in Altsax Studios, Tervuren, Belgium, with artwork and photos by Godelieve Simons
POETRY READINGS:
A few hundred, since 1961, in the USA, Europe, Australia, and Africa, usually (1995 onward) with saxophone or other musical accompaniment
Emanuel’s first jazz-and-blues haiku concert, 8 November 1995, here with saxophonist Chansse Evanns at the American Library in Paris.
PIONEER ACTIVITIES:
Taught in Europe (1960s, 70s) university courses in Black literature. His Dark Symphony (1968) broke almost 30 years of publishers’ neglect. As 1970 committee member, convinced New York to teach Black literature. Created in 1992 a new poetic genre, jazz-and-blues haiku, capturing, says
Lotus Press, “the essence of African American thought and experience.”
INTERNATIONAL WRITERS’ CONFERENCES:
Attended, upon invitation always, in England (1971), Yugoslavia (1982, 1986), Belgium (1990), France (1989, 92, 96), Canary Islands (1995), and Germany (1999)
VIDEO DOCUMENTARY ON EMANUEL:
Filmed and recorded by Godelieve Simons in France, the USA, and Ireland
BIOBIBLIOGRAPHY (SELECTIVE & ABBREVIATED):
Michel Fabre, La Rive Noire (1985) and From Harlem to Paris (1991)
Marvin Holdt, Black American Literature Forum (Fall 1979)
Leslie McBee, Belgrade’s Pregled 219 (1982) re Emanuel in Yugoslavia
Negative Capability, XI, No. 3 (1991) and The Dallas Morning News (15 March 1992, rpt. in One Voice, 1994): essay-interviews
Radio France discussion of De la Rage
au Coeur on « Panorama » program (3 Sept 1992)
Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (1996)
Douglas Watson, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 41 (1985)
Way B(l)ack Then and Now: A Street Guide to African Americans in Paris (1992): 14 entries treat Emanuel
INTERNET REFERENCES:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/S1-DES1.htm “The Not So Strange Emanuel Case” by Dan Schneider The essay begins with “In the annals of American poetry it is difficult to conceive of a more neglected great poet than James A. Emanuel.” (2001)
http://www.plagiarist.com/features/emanuel/whole_grain.php
Whole Grain: Collected Poems, 1958-1989
http://www.plagiarist.com/features/emanuel/whole_grain.php
Jazz from the
Haiku King
(Each Plagiarist site has 11 poems with French translations by Jean Migrenne)
http://www.usembassy.de/consular/leipzig/emanuel.htm (Photos of James A. Emanuel’s 7 December 2000 poetry reading with jazz guitarist at US Consulate General in Leipzig, Germany)
A FEW POEMS:
From:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Neglected%20A-F.htm#James%20Emanuel
“For my money THE most neglected published poet of the 20th Century. An
expatriate African-American, Emanuel is masterly in free verse & form,
personal & political.” (Dan Schneider)
"To all things great and glorious":
his wine moved to his lips.
"There are so few," she answered;
her brim touched his fingertips.
They stared the
fire into an ash;
their glasses bent their hands
while they, enchanted wistfully,
re-travelled many lands.
Something slow moves through him, watched by hills.
Something low within each rock receives
His noonday wish, then crumbles rich; so fills
Each furrow that the prairie year upheaves.
His arm has lain with boulders. His copper hand
Has mused on roots, uncaring of barbed wire.
His fist has closed on thistle, and dug the land
For corn October snows have whelmed entire.
Something flows with him in stubborn streams,
And in the parted foliage something lives
In upright green, stirred by the rhythmic gleams
Of his hoe and spade. From worn-out arms he gives;
The earth receives, turns all his pain to soil,
Where he believes, and testifies through toil.
(A Cosmoetica exclusive- For a Farmer translated into French by
James Emanuel's translator, Jean Migrenne, migrenne.j@club-internet.fr)
Au Paysan
Lente est la force en lui, sous l’œil lourd
des collines.
Riche est la glèbe quand à ses vœux de midi
Se rend la pierre si basse ; quand la prairie
Féconde en sa saison se donne à son labour.
Il a étreint les roches et sa main de cuivre
A flatté les racines sous le barbelé.
Il a empoigné le chardon, vu ses maïs
Disparaître sous les hautes neiges d’octobre.
Des fleuves obstinés se déversent en lui,
Et du feuillage écarté il point une vie
De virile verdure qu’impulsent sa houe
Et l’éclat de son fer. Ses bras harassés donnent;
La terre reçoit, que fertilise un labeur
Qui est sa foi, son credo, sa condition.
Sonnet for a Writer
Far rather would I search my chaff for grain
And cease at last with hunger in my soul,
Than suck the polished wheat another brain
Refurbished till it shone, by art's control.
To stray across my own mind's half-hewn stone
And chisel in the dark, in hopes to cast
A fragment of our common self, my own,
Excels the mimicry of sages past.
Go forth, my soul, in painful, lonely flight,
Even if no higher than the earthbound tree,
And feel suffusion with more glorious light,
Nor envy eagles their proud brilliancy.
Far better to create one living line
Than learn a hundred sunk in fame's recline.
(A Cosmoetica exclusive- Sonnet for a Writer translated into French
by James Emanuel's translator, Jean Migrenne, migrenne.j@club-internet.fr)
Sonnet À
l’homme de plume
Plutôt racler les fonds de mon propre grenier
Et me retrouver Gros-Jean la disette à l’âme,
Que resucer le froment bien fourbi qu’un autre
A bruni de son art et longtemps peaufiné.
Passer le marbre dégrossi de mon idée,
Et, ciseau en aveugle, espérer que je forme
Un banal fragment, le mien, de l’humanité,
C’est rendre au centuple la sagesse d’antan.
Pars, souffre, mon âme et t’envole solitaire,
Même si tu vas pas plus haut que mon arbre,
Imprègne-toi et brille de belle lumière
Sans envier l’aigle et son magnifique orgueil.
Mieux vaut écrire un seul vers et lui donner vie
Que d’en apprendre mille amolli dans la gloire.
READINGS NOW PROPOSED:
45-60 min. w/ or w/o on-the-spot musician(s). Possible accompanying related-art display by graveuse Godelieve Simons (www.chez.com/gsimons)
CONTACT POET FOR READINGS:
James A. Emanuel
Boîte Postale 339
75266 Paris Cedex 06
FRANCE
fax +33-1-45493266
James writes: “It’s snail-mail for snails, and it’s dinosaur technology for dinosaurs …”
Unfortunately, despite this Bard’s prodding, James refused to move into the 21st Century and has not even a computer, let alone e-mail!
James’s e-mail: james@james-a-emanuel.com will only end up in his Webmaster’s ‘Inbox’!
Webmaster to James’s Homepage: marco@marcopolopoet.com but this Bard too
(who is in St. Petersburg, Russia and James is in Paris) has only snail-mail
contact with James.
St. Petersburg, Russia,