Scrap Irons of Painful Mercy

In August 1955, an informant supplied the FBI with a set of unpublished poems by Calvin Hernton, then a 23-year-old graduate student at Fisk University in Nashville. Though he was an unknown Black poet, Hernton’s interest in leftist politics and civil rights made him a target of the US government’s Cold War suspicions. In fact, the FBI was so interested in Hernton’s poems that two of them, “The Lynchers” and “The Poet,” were transcribed into a report on Hernton’s so-called “revolutionary statements.” The conclusion of “The Poet”—“Enemy, Beware! ... // My fist is clinched / To strike you dead!”—was singled out as evidence of his potential Communist allegiance. When interviewed by the FBI, Hernton told Director Hoover’s ad hoc lit crit agents that he was not a member of the Communist Party, had read The Communist Manifesto only once, and Walt Whitman was his favorite poet. Despite Hernton’s assurances, he was surveilled into the next decade, resulting in a 40-page FBI file reflective of the Bureau’s anti-communist paranoia.

In 1963, when agents reading a short story by Hernton in Freedomways noticed that his contributor bio listed him as editor of a new literary magazine, Umbra, FBI researchers went to the New York Public Library on a bibliographic goose chase looking for a copy. After the Bureau’s indices of un-American publications returned no results for Umbra and informants failed to find any links between Hernton and the Communist Party, agents noted “no further investigation is being conducted.” Ironically, the subversive force of his career as a poet was just beginning.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1932, Hernton grew up in the Jim Crow South. His childhood memories were marked by the legacy of the Great Depression, the threat of the Ku Klux Klan, and bewildering experiences of othering that “caused a certain void to occur in me,” as he later wrote. That sense of alienation became a signature texture in Hernton’s writing. After graduating from Talladega College in 1954, where he wrote his earliest poems, Hernton earned a master’s degree in sociology at Fisk University for his thesis about the Montgomery bus boycotts. He also attended weekly writing workshops at poet Robert Hayden’s home in Nashville.

Hernton’s friendship with Hayden, whose poetry he passionately defended against detractors in the era of Black Power, was pivotal for Hernton’s sense of his mission as a poet. “Hayden possessed the capacity, that quality of humility,” Hernton wrote, “that enabled him to feel so deeply, so authentically, that he became the experiences he wrote about.” When Hernton defines the poet as a figure of “perpetual struggle, an eternal / Cause of the people” in his early poem “The Underlying Strife,” it is that authenticity, Hayden’s “absolute feeling,” that the young poet is striving for. Hernton’s often-anthologized poem “The Distant Drum,” written at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, aims for the same authenticity:

I am not a metaphor or symbol.
This you hear is not the wind in the trees.
Nor a cat being maimed in the street.
I am being maimed in the street
It is I who weep, laugh, feel pain or joy.
Speak this because I exist.

Building toward the ethical recognition of the speaker as a living, suffering subject, the poem ends with a forceful declaration: “It is my fist you hear beating / Against your ear.”

Following four years of teaching social science at historically Black colleges and universities in Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida and “[u]nable to survive in those environments,” Hernton moved to New York City in 1961. The bohemian culture on the Lower East Side became the setting for his own aesthetic revolution. “Recklessly and excitedly, I gave myself to writing and the life it entailed,” he wrote. Although Hernton’s poems from the late 1950s echo the styles of Hayden and Langston Hughes, the latter of whom Hernton had met on summer visits to New York, there are flashes of visceral imagery that anticipate the avant-garde expansion of his poems in the 1960s. “The dynamite of blackness explodes the pit / Beyond my grave—” Hernton wrote in his elegy “Richard Wright [1],” calling on images of fragmentation and metaphysical forcefulness that stretch beyond direct comprehension.

The longer poems Hernton began writing in New York, featuring images of “Up turn glass, in my throat / The rot of 125th Street” (“125th Street, Harlem, U.S.A.”) and transformative statements such as “I am harassment in lilac bud / Decay in order and change in law” (“Burnt Sabbath, Mount Morris Park, Harlem”), document the visions of an estranged speaker thrashing at the violent contradictions bound up in American society’s systemic anti-Blackness. “Your religion is killing / Your myths are lies,” Hernton wrote in “Hate Poem,” unleashing himself as “monster, demon” on the murderous fictions of white Americans from whom “I want more, much more than you possess / I want more than you are capable of wanting.”

As he began participating in the coffeehouse readings on the Lower East Side and publishing in little magazines, Hernton’s desire to “make my stand / As a human being, / As a Black man” (“Emigrant”) brought him into a burgeoning community of Black writers and artists. In 1962, alongside poets Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson, Ishmael Reed, and Askia Touré, among others, Hernton founded the Society of Umbra, a group whose workshops, public readings, and self-titled magazine became “the cradle of the Black Arts movement in New York,” as Amiri Baraka acknowledged. What brought Umbra together, Hernton wrote, was the need to “do something about the isolation and anonymity we felt.” Umbra became what Hernton called a “black arts poetry machine,” a collective that, though it lasted just two years, “constituted a lifetime.” Reed admits, “If The New Yorker calls me ‘fearless,’ it’s because, like Calvin Hernton, I had been a member of Umbra.” This sense of mutual strength comes through in Hernton’s poem “Taurus by Aster Fire” in which a metaphysical world of myth, love, and memory reveals a marginalized collective joined “Pole to pole / Umbra to umbra / In the turning.” Hernton’s peers in Umbra recognized him as a visionary within the group. Joe Johnson wrote, “we heard Hernton singing what we were talking about.”

By the mid-1960s, Hernton seemed poised to become one of the country’s most well-known Black writers. His first book of poetry, The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, was published by the small press Interim Books in 1964, followed by his sociological work Sex and Racism in America (1965), the book of essays White Papers for White Americans (1966), and his appearance in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968). Reed said, “Hernton walked away from it,” forgoing his potential notoriety and the tokenism that likely would have accompanied it. Moving to London in 1965, Hernton participated in the “anti-psychiatry” movement associated with R.D. Laing, worked with members of the Caribbean Artists Movement, and taught briefly at the Antiuniversity of London, a short-lived experimental school with roots in the counterculture. He stayed in the United Kingdom and Europe for the next five years. After he returned to the United States, he was appointed writer-in-residence at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1971, soon becoming an associate professor in the college’s new Black Studies Department. Hernton’s students knew him as “Socrates,” the nickname he had picked up as an undergraduate at Talladega College. He remained at Oberlin until his retirement in 1999. Hernton passed away in his Ohio home on September 30, 2001.

The publication of the Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), edited by the scholars David Grundy and Lauri Scheyer, presents the occasion to assess Hernton’s incredible range. More than 220 pages, including many previously unpublished and uncollected poems, an insightful set of notes, a meticulous bibliography, and a deft introduction by the editors, Selected Poems is a long-overdue retrospective of one of the 20th century’s most important yet least-known Black American poets. As Reed writes in the foreword, “this book provides readers with the kind of serious grownup attention that Calvin Hernton, a significant artist, deserves.” In his recent book on Umbra and the Black Arts Movement, A Black Arts Poetry Machine (2019), Grundy notes that Hernton “remains an obscure figure, sometimes briefly cited in studies of the BAM but almost never read in critical depth.” Nevertheless, Reed contends that Hernton is “one of the best poets in America.” A lifelong advocate of Hernton’s work, Reed published two of Hernton’s three poetry books, including Medicine Man: Collected Poems (1976) and The Red Crab Gang and Black River Poems (1999). Because Hernton’s first book was not collected in Medicine Man, Grundy and Scheyer’s Selected Poems is the first opportunity for readers to encounter the full scope of Hernton’s poetry in one volume.

The editors organize Hernton’s poetry into organic sections, each prefaced by a prose excerpt from a corresponding time in his career. For example, in the opening section, “South to North: Early Work,” Hernton begins on a grand, unruly, metaphysical note, announcing “I write because I feel I am being outraged by life. I am alone and I am everybody, I am God” before descending into a Cold War–era, Ginsbergian clatter of words that anticipates the dislocations documented in his poems: “and I am so parturient with nuclear debris and soul deprivation, and I am going to human being always explode scrap irons of painful mercy.” As the editors note, Hernton’s “satirical, ferocious, and despairing” poems record a “prophetic fury in the face of democracy betrayed.” The arrangement of his poetry with these prose excerpts amplifies this radical quality throughout the book. Combined with Reed’s affable foreword, which helpfully describes the eccentricities of Hernton’s character, including jumping spontaneously into the Hudson River and his penchant for reciting Bible verses with Shakespearean flair, the Selected Poems creates as full a portrait as possible of Hernton and his work.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of this book is its inclusion of The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, reprinted for the first time since its initial publication in 1964. A three-part, book-length persona poem that documents the collapse of the Old South as a fever dream embodied by the elderly white matriarch Eleanor Nightsong, The Coming of Chronos is a singular record of Hernton’s Umbra-era poetics. Originally composed to be performed at the coffeehouse reading series at Les Deux Mégots in the East Village, the first section, “The Legacy of the House,” introduces a portrait of “my people—the Nightsong Lineage.” A former slave-owning family whose history of racial terror is sublimated as the legacy of a “just and most democratic” Southern culture, the family’s now rotting planation house is occupied by the proud, lonely presence of the 100-year-old Eleanor Nightsong. Cataloging a lifetime of births, deaths, and relationships with men, both white and Black, she fondly recalls the enslaved who were “imported and domesticated to serve in the enterprise of our building.” “The past is a living thing” the relic-like figure announces, ensconced in the architecture of a violent history still disturbingly contemporary.

Foregrounding the role of white women in constructing and perpetuating white supremacy—“negras are born black and the white people are born white,” Eleanor says—Hernton narrates a metaphysical portrait of a contradictory Southern apocalypse in which the “era of Black Domination, like a mammoth plague, fell upon the Southland” at the same time that “Nothing has changed, nothing will change.” A living monument to a decaying world whose racist legacies continued to be fiercely defended in 1962, the year of Eleanor’s centennial, Hernton’s speaker watches as “Oh stars go out! / Oh pigeons fly in and out of my mouth!” while “the news [is] crumbling beneath my feet and around my body.”

Like a despot clinging to her throne, she bemoans the “terrible, complicated freedom let loose among my people” as the “wrecking crew” approaches to destroy the house that she will not abandon. Nightsong’s proclamation at the poem’s end, “We are going to suffer now,” is as much a statement about her own family’s future as it is a caustic threat, a curse on a modern world demanding change while unable to reflect on the historical realities that continue to defer that change. Renewed availability to The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, a strange, unsettling, and formally singular book, adds a vital layer to conversations about the variety of aesthetic experimentation that produced the Black Arts Movement.

Hernton’s poems oscillate between South and North, the United States and abroad, the anguish of memory and the urgency of uprising, and reading them together, as the editors argue, “synthesizes and reveals the contradictions of the life he lived.” His work from the 1960s also records the contradictions of American culture and identity writ large, training a Whitmanic eye that focuses on the country’s knotted racial inequities with an audacious surreality. For instance, one of Hernton’s most important poems, “The Gift Outraged,” is a subversive tour de force against what he would later call the “acid regime” of American hegemony. A critical undoing of the settler colonial narrative of “The Gift Outright,” the poem Robert Frost read at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, Hernton’s poem describes a nightmarish vision of Tompkins Square Park in downtown New York. An alienated speaker, “the One,” lives in a world with the “Moon out of orbit,” walking through the ominous “Red dawn” of the park among the unhoused, the listless, and Holocaust survivors:

Many mornings
I have found myself in the park
Circled to circles
Where piss-stained benches call forth zombie
Supplicants pale and dry
From Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau, Austria
The Ukraine—
And stray casualties
From where discarded wine bottles are of more value
Than human life—

Hernton’s “the One” also encounters a “haggard witch” who has been “pillaging cans of litter and garbage.” Approaching him as a familiar, the woman enters a monologue about the surveillance state that surrounds the ostracized community in the park, describing an imagined scene of top-secret documents blowing through the streets. Paranoia and disenfranchisement permeate the poem at nearly every turn. Under the shadow of the statue of Samuel Sullivan Cox, a congressman who opposed the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans during the Civil War—a statue that still stands today—Hernton wrote that “he is alone in the dark park” where even “the moon mumbles Black Sonofabitch at him.”

Hernton’s ability to directly subvert a canonical American poet such as Frost to complicate the image of the Lower East Side as an inclusive bohemian bastion and insist there was “no refuge” for a Black poet in the United States in 1964, the same year as the passage of the Civil Rights Act, is a testament to his work’s resolute critical power. Just as in his prose, Hernton refused to settle on simple conclusions or to adopt a progressive political narrative that does not tell the whole truth. For example, his essay about attending the March on Washington in 1963, “Stranger in Babylon,” from White Papers for White Americans, can be read as an accompaniment to “The Gift Outraged.” Although the historical gathering was undeniably a watershed moment in the Civil Rights Movement, Hernton experienced the march as a performance of political critique whose power had been relinquished by the organizers’ collaboration with the government. In place of the iconic image of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Hernton offered another quintessential American image:

And then I saw something else. The militia! Cops and soldiers were everywhere. Their faces were stern and cold. Their guns were ready in their holsters, and in their firm hands were the big black sticks. Trucks and jeeps and walkie-talkies. I felt whatever people feel when they are in captivity. The military was spaced out in strategic places, on top of buildings, at high vantage points with telescopes and rifles, jets flying so low as to drown out the speakers. We were under total surveillance.

Estranged within the event’s “thoroughly policed” staging, Hernton’s most poignant emotional experience during the march was the announcement of the death of W.E.B. Du Bois, who had passed away in Ghana the day before. “When I heard the announcement I sat on the ground. Behind my sunglasses tears flooded my eyes.” Hernton’s vulnerability, which bound him to a lineage of Black writers and liberatory writing, combined with his acute documentation of the United States as a claustrophobic police state, made him an indispensable witness to the complexities of racial alienation in the 1960s. As Hernton wrote in his vital essay “Dynamite Growing Out of Their Skulls,” published in the anthology Black Fire, Black Americans “are not alienated from America, they are alienated within America.”

Hernton’s poems record the communal responses to this systemic alienation, such as “The Mob,” in which “New York, Chicago, Birmingham, / Newark, Atlanta, Watts” are explosive, apocalyptic scenes of uprising and resistance and “The sun also screams.” The poem moves between metaphysical imagery and deep political feeling in ways characteristic of much of his work:

Fire tongued to dead ears
Wintered selves
Digging graves in summertime.
 
There is something dreadful
About our being here this way, undulating
In the streets,
Blasted down, flesh scorched by liquid rays
Of baptismal hose,
Something abandoned, fetching
At the worm in the rock of our fists,
Something in the breast
Which the heart cannot
Or dare not utter.

Seeking mutual solidarity yet bound “North of dark in chains,” as Hernton writes in “Medicine Man,” his poems construct a dim world of collective estrangement and loss in which “We may not live until love / Until moon.” In his London-era poem “An Unexpurgated Communiqué to David Henderson,” he writes “Oh, I am in this world without a passport to humanity!” This sense of being perpetually othered repeats in his work through the image of the scarecrow, a figure central to his novel Scarecrow (1974), a haunted, visceral fictionalization of Hernton’s experience leaving the United States in the mid-1960s. This alienation continued to fuel the critical power of Hernton’s poems for the rest of his life.  From “You Take a Country Like America”: “You take a name like love / Or a word like America. / I take them in my hands and crush them, / I press the crumbs in the wiry hair of / My chest.”

The poems Hernton wrote after returning to the United States in the early 1970s through the end of his life, though not as guttural as his earlier work, continued to amplify his critical attention to the country’s racial and cultural complexities, from observing the mundane threat of boys in an Ohio bar “at work on the masculinity / Of their manhood” (“The Tap House, South Main Street, Oberlin Ohio”) to elegizing the death of Michael Stewart in police custody in New York City in 1983—a killing at the hands of “men dressed in dungeon blue.” Hernton’s poetry also increasingly turned to memorializing the turbulent history of the Sixties, including praising Amiri Baraka as the poet who “kidnapped lightning, handcuffed thunder / wrote his autobiography on gravestones and put / the dead on a wonder” (“A Cat by Any Name”) and inventorying the “Joy you gonna see / Joy you gonna see / Joy for the dead” in his litany-fueled elegy for the poet Ree Dragonette, “A Canticle for the 1960s.” As much as alienation and anguish permeate these poems, they are also full of humanistic celebration and resolve. “Sing a song of praise,” he writes, “and do not mourn.”

Hernton’s poems are at their best when his personal and sociological attention mixes with the unexpected metaphysical symbolism that is the backbone of his poetics. At times, the dramatic inventorying in his poems might seem redundant, and perhaps their reaching for authenticity can feel stilted. Umbra member Tom Dent’s description in his review of Medicine Man is equally applicable to the Selected Poems. Dent wrote that “Sometimes the cries of pain seem too strident, too conscious of themselves making a scene; sometimes the language seems too hidden in obscurities, unexplained motives. But the voice is out there, trying to capture those empty spaces, those small unmentionables, the unspeakables.”

If Hernton’s poetry is often wedded strongly to dichotomies—white and Black, male and female, good and evil—it is because he was trying to dismantle the power of those binaries that so violently structure the world. Moving between the everyday and the philosophical, his poetry is a record, as he writes in “Medicine Man,” of having “Recalled what I failed to know / In an estranged familiar tongue.” These contradictions of speaking and knowing and how they accumulated over a life are at the heart of Hernton’s writing.

Dent wrote that “Hernton’s work stands at the very vortex of the explosion of black poetry in the Sixties.” It’s also true that Hernton’s poetry stands powerfully in the present as a now-recovered voice that can help measure and confront the ongoing crises his work so assiduously documents. Having his Selected Poems should also bring his larger contributions into view, especially the ways he engaged in more progressive, equitable traditions of American intellectualism later in his career. His literary-sociological work on the intersections of race, gender, and class led him increasingly to an anti-sexist position that culminated in The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers (1987). As he wrote in the mid-1980s, “feminists and lesbian feminists … are at the forefront of the critics, scholars, intellectuals, and ideologues of our time,” a too-uncommon pronouncement among male poets whose careers began in the 1960s.

In the mode of his uncompromising essay about the March on Washington, he continued to write forcefully through the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including diagnosing the backlash to Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas for sexual harassment, responding scathingly to critic Harold Bloom’s conservative diatribe against multiculturalism in American poetry, and championing Black women writers such as Alice Walker and Ann Petry. Hernton’s commitment to the belief that “what is invented can be un-invented. That which is imposed can be resisted, subverted, uprooted, changed” is everywhere apparent in the Selected Poems, an indispensable book in which, as Hernton writes in “Black Metathesis,” “Black makes the sun come through the cracks / And warms this lonely place.”