Read Cornelius Eady’s forward in the new edition of The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown
Edited by the late distinguished poet Michael S. Harper, this classic collection includes a new foreword by award-winning poet Cornelius Eady and the original introduction by Michael S. Harper, as well as introductions to Southern Road by James Weldon Johnson and Sterling Stuckey. The result is a tour de force by one of the most distinctive poets in American letters.
The Poet Laureate Of The Jim Crow South:
forward to The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown
These days, it’s difficult to turn on the radio, or internet, or cable TV, and not feel you are living deep inside of a poem by Sterling A. Brown; Trayvon Martin, a black teenage boy, shot down while on a Skittle run; Sandra Bland, a black woman, pulled out of her car at a traffic stop for asking “why” when the cop ordered her to put out her cigarette, then found dead, hung in her cell days later, Eric Garner, put into a choke hold and wrestled to the sidewalk by cops for selling loose cigarettes, his cries for air, to be allowed to breathe ignored:
They swung up Johnny on a tree, and filled his
Swinging hide with lead …
It didn’t come off at midnight
Nor yet at the break of day
It was in the broad noon daylight
When they put po’ Will away…
They got the shotguns
They got the ropes
We git the justice
In the end …
That sound you hear, of black bodies falling, are they landing in the 1930’s when these lines were written, or are they right outside your window? There’s a part of me that regrets we’ll never again read new verse from Sterling A. Brown on this topic, but then, really, is there any need for Mr. Brown, the poet laureate of the Jim Crow South to repeat himself? The only items missing from these poems are clicks, likes and body cams.
The art of Sterling A. Brown is the art of a poet who refuses to blink. In his poems, as you will read, black folk are allowed to be, so the warts of a people are allowed to co-habit with the heroic. In my teen aged years in the ’60 and ‘70’s, that was called the art of being “real”. In that, I believe he was ahead of his time.
How do you live black, knowing that at any time you can be killed for being black? That question is the at core of the poetry of Sterling A. Brown, which still works as a revelation. His reply is long, complex, like a blues with an infinite variation of verses. And though the dialect and players may be different, because he got it right, the circumstances still sound like us.
Cornelius Eady
Professor of English
SUNY Stony Brook Southampton
Co-Founder, Cave Canem Foundation