Weaving Jagged Words into Song: On Frank Marshall Davis

Perhaps it was serendipity that brought Frank Marshall Davis and me together. Even though Davis had written six books and mingled with the likes of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and other literary luminaries, I didn’t discover him until the mid-eighties when a national call went out to researchers and college teachers that contributors were needed for a new volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography—one focusing on African American writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. By the time the list of authors came to my attention, the names I thought most interesting had been taken. Davis was among the remaining choices. My decision was made when I discovered that, like me, he was from southern Kansas. The Dictionary of Literary Biography entry proved to be fortuitous. Over the next several years, it led me to publish a lengthy interview with him and to edit his memoirs, collected poems, and a fair sampling of his work as a journalist. Each of these books had its difficulties. A distinctive voice and a penchant for resisting traditional norms made editing his poetry the most challenging, but these features of his verse piqued my curiosity. What else, I wondered, made his work a departure from usual poetic practice and therefore innovative in the history of Black poetry?

In her 1936 review of Davis’s Black Man’s Verse, Harriet Monroe, in this magazine, proclaimed that there was “a good deal of strength, much satirical club-bludgeoning over injustices to his race, some epigrammatic wit, and often touches of imaginative beauty” in the collection. She further expressed an appreciation of his experimentation with form, saying it reminded her of such venerated poets as Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Alfred Kreymborg. Don’t be mistaken: this was high praise, not an accusation of being derivative. In effect, Monroe located Davis in a well-defined poetry tradition, which went a long way toward establishing his legitimacy. But her enthusiasm had its limits: “We will pass over the bitter things Mr. Davis has to say about lynchings, and Scottsboro, and Georgia’s Atlanta of chain-gangs, breadlines, and the Ku-Klux Klan, for the racial passion in which, heaven knows, there is reason enough.” In passing over “the bitter things,” Monroe touched on arguably the most contentious feature about Davis’s verse—critics’ uneasiness about the relationship he established between art and social causes.

A few literary critics sensed an inordinate amount of bitterness in Davis’s work and claimed it was the predominant tone in all his poetry. Nick Aaron Ford, one of the few academically trained Black literary critics to emerge in the thirties, was arguably his harshest critic. To Ford, Davis eschewed all conventions of “good” poetry and created a body of verse that exemplified the worst excesses of “social realism” and “propaganda.” I found Ford’s assessment to be surprising. He had painted Davis’s oeuvre as being one undifferentiated collection of poems, and had failed to recognize or acknowledge that while Davis had written some poems in a social realist vein, others were jazz, social satire, love, and lyric poems. When I delved deeper into Ford’s aesthetics, I understood the basis for his evaluation. Ford’s revised master’s thesis, published as The Contemporary Negro Novel, bore the subtitle of A Study in Race Relations. He felt Davis had created work that did nothing to facilitate harmonious interracial relations. Instead, Davis’s work was written in “bad taste” and with little hope of “winning sympathetic consideration.”

I see how Ford reached his conclusion. In some poems, Davis responded to racism, religious hypocrisy, Black political cowardice, and other social ills in a strong declamatory voice. This tone could be considered strident, disquieting, or derisive. Consequently, the lines separating his poetry from his news writing often seemed blurred. The speaker in his “Frank Marshall Davis: Writer” declared:

I was a weaver of jagged words
A warbler of garbled tunes
A singer of savage songs
I was bitter
Yes

Other critics saw greater poetic possibilities in Davis’s work. In his review of Davis’s 47th Street: Poems, for example, Langston Hughes, with equanimity, observed: “When Davis’s poems are poetry, they are powerful.” It’s as if Hughes understood what Davis would later say: “Since I am blues-oriented, I try to be as direct as good blues. This implies social commentary.” In his brief statement, Hughes also helped me to see that Ford had interpolated “bitterness” into a critique of Davis’s poems as merely bombastic, inartistic, recalcitrant, and propagandistic. This was a familiar charge leveled at sociopolitical poetry in the thirties. Such verse was castigated because it was different from the late-nineteenth-century conception of art characterized by an idealized social arrangement in which the human condition was lifted in lyrical lines above a mundane world. Davis’s verse, I concluded, invited consideration on different grounds. Instead of a narrow rhetorical construction, Davis had expanded the sociopolitical to include the nineteenth-century ideal.

Take “Cabaret,” for instance, a poem Harriet Monroe described as “the best built and most successful of the larger pieces” in Black Man’s Verse. Its experiment with free verse gave it an improvisational feel, like a jazz or blues song. The opening stanza introduced the instruments in the band as personifications of churchgoers, transforming the cabaret into hallowed ground. In so doing, the poem raised a question that was perennially debated: “where do blues leave off and hymns begin?” The world, as Davis experienced it, was beset with sorrow but sustained by living. An adequate representation of this milieu had to be “as direct as good blues.” Thus, the poem was a response to emotional needs in a highly complex, rapidly moving world.

But the use of a music motif was not the only way Davis confronted the world and confounded his critics. As Monroe observed, Davis also had a satiric bent too. He participated in the larger tradition of African American satire that sought to provide a corrective to political and personal injustices. This tradition employed several strategies, including such forms or stylistic devices as burlesque, parody, irony, and the comic. In a section titled “Ebony Under Granite,” he created his own Spoon River Anthology where Black sleepers under headstones spoke back to the living, such as Giles Johnson, PhD—a man with four college degrees who “could orate in Latin/or cuss in Greek.” Nevertheless, Johnson died of starvation “because he wouldn’t teach/and couldn’t porter.” The satiric knife cut both ways. It pointed at Black hubris and subtly indicted whites for proscribing the life and livelihoods of Black Americans.

In a radical departure from social engagement, Davis’s bevy of lyric and love poems revealed an uncharacteristic softness, a tenderness quite at odds with his work in other forms. The lyric poems about nature, for instance, are awash with liquid images, sibilant sounds, and a striking range of metaphoric language. As he said in his interview with me, which is reprinted in this folio, “good poetry condenses and distills emotions by painting unusual—perhaps memorable—pictures with words.” For him, such poems were private, personal evocations. A love poem like “To You” illustrates what he called “introspective emotion”:

Gray haze of a summer afternoon
Green of the Pacific Ocean
Brown of oak leaves in November
and You—
These are lovely things.

Davis’s love and lyric poems demonstrate how well-rounded he was as a poet. Certainly, they help to disabuse the idea that he was one-dimensional.

With hindsight, readers can now see how Davis fits into a more expansive history of African American literature than was widely available at the time he was writing. Even in the seventies, when he returned from Hawaii to the mainland after a twenty-five-year absence for a poetry tour of historically Black colleges including Howard University, Davis recalled being greeted as “the long lost father of modern Black poetry” who was “20 years ahead of his time.” The young, insurgent Black Arts students delighted in his affirmation of Black people and his artistry in confronting social ills. Since Davis’s death in 1987, the frantic, politically charged world he lived in has become even more complicated. Perhaps it’s time for us to rediscover him.