BANK HOLIDAY WITH MY BAROQUE PAPA [by Dante Micheaux]

In a 1999 essay published in The Southern Review, literary critic Laurence Goldstein implies Robert Hayden’s “Perseus” to be the greatest poem in the world. Though it may not reach such titular extravagance for me, it is my favorite Hayden poem and the reason why I continue to return to him again and again.  

            Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass

of serpents torpidly astir

            burned into the mirroring shield—

                        a scathing image dire

            as hated truth the mind accepts at last

                        and festers on.

            I struck. The shield flashed bare.

 

            Yet even as I lifted up the head

                        and started from that place

            of gazing silences and terrored stone,

                        I thirsted to destroy.

            None could have passed me then—

                        no garland-bearing girl, no priest

            or staring boy—and lived.

 Hayden is an important American poet and should be read more widely than he is. Reasons for his marginalization arise from the racial divide that plagued (continues to plague) American literary politics. Hayden was such an adept poet that he could not be denied by the “white literary establishment” of mid-twentieth century America and that acceptance made him an outcast among the rising Black Nationalist literati of the same era. One had thought him rescued with the posthumous publication of his Collected Poemsin 1985 and its reintroduction by the venerable Arnold Rampersad in 1996. His prominence, however, is still lacking—though for my generation of Black American poets he is the undisputed heavyweight. Like they love posters of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in February, white readers of Hayden love “Those Winter Sundays”; and they love the one about Bessie Smith because, well, who does “the blues” better than Black folk? But there is so much more to Hayden! As Goldstein points out: “For a great-souled author like Hayden there can be no question of choosing one realm, one racial history, rather than another. The Perseus myth belongs exclusively neither to whites nor to blacks, but to all races, because it illuminates the tragic experience of all races.” Hayden knew the path through the desolation of human action and his true contribution to the world was a poetics of peace. Reading him is to show him gratitude.