From “An Interview with Frank Marshall Davis”

John Edgar Tidwell: When you left the mainland for Hawaii in 1948, you virtually disappeared from the community of American poets. Your works were included regularly in anthologies, but the same biographical information was usually appended. As a result, we know very little of Frank Marshall Davis, poet. How did you come to write poetry?

Frank Marshall Davis: I first began writing poetry while a student at Kansas State College [now University] around 1925, and I was influenced by a magazine called Others which featured the new revolutionary style called free verse. Sonnets and, in fact, all rhyme held little of interest for me. But I liked Edgar Allan Poe because of his jazzy jangles. I did not care for blank verse; the discipline of rhythm and meter got in my way. One day I visited the college library and idly thumbed through Others before I went to a class in English literature. My instructor, Ada Rice, that day gave us a choice of bringing in an essay or an original poem for the next class. Others had walloped me almost as hard as hearing my first jazz and blues some years earlier. I felt immediate kinship with this new poetry and felt I could write something in a similar vein. l preferred trying this to an essay. Besides it was far easier. So I wrote my first poem and turned it in. The following class Miss Rice asked me to stay after the others left. She wanted to know what else I had written. Surprised, I told her nothing at all. She then asked me to bring her anything else. Realizing I must be on to something, I wrote two more. After reading these she asked for still more. A couple of weeks later she asked me to type them so she could submit the group to Ur Rune chapter of the American College Quill Club, a national creative writing organization. I submitted and was one of those accepted as a member that year. There were only twenty-six Black students at the entire college, and I immediately became a curiosity, soon becoming known as “the poet who looks like a prizefighter.”

JET: You came of age when the New American Poetry of Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay was popular. Did these writers mean anything to you?

FMD: Very soon at Kansas State I came across the poetry of Carl Sandburg who was far and away my greatest single influence. Sandburg became my idol because of his hard, muscular poetry, which turned me on. Edgar Lee Masters, especially his Spoon River Anthology, was also of great influence. I like Masters because of his economy of words and ability to knife through to the heart; I had no patience with his rhyme. Lindsay’s sounds, his feeling of jazz and syncopation, pleased me. To a lesser extent I was captivated by Robinson. I liked Robinson, but he did not have the smashing impact of the others. e. e. cummings and Maxwell Bodenheim also appealed to me. But I cared little for Robert Frost. As for e. e. cummings, I felt a kindred rebel spirit which I could not find in Frost or Eliot. To me they seemed lukewarm.

JET: Few, if any, Black poets writing after World War I followed Pound and Eliot into the new territory they charted for poetry, which emphasized the importance of ritual, myth, and symbol. Why did Black poets find them “lukewarm,” and why did you choose a different course for your writing?

FMD: I could not relate to Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot. Their preoccupation with myth and ritual turned me off as I believe it did other Black poets. I think that rebellion is deep in the psyche of most Black poets, and neither Pound nor Eliot and others of that type had this basic ingredient.

JET: Did you find any Black poets useful in your own aesthetic development?

FMD: I was greatly influenced during these early years by one Black poet, Fenton Johnson of Chicago. I looked upon him as a kindred soul. I found him at a time when I needed him. This was before I was acquainted with any other Black free verse practitioner. Because of my using Sandburg as a role model, I tended to judge all poets, whether white or Black, by their kinship to Sandburg. I came to know Fenton Johnson while we were both members of a small, short-lived writers’ group early in my Chicago days. Our mutual admiration for Sandburg was a bond. Johnson was both quiet and self-effacing. Later, when I became acquainted with their work, I developed great fondness and respect for Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes. The same was true, although to a lesser extent, with Claude McKay, who, incidentally, spent a semester or two at Kansas State. Before World War II, the region’s top critics often pointed out that “the state’s three foremost writers are all Negroes: McKay, Hughes, and Davis.” Incidentally, I found no appeal at all in Fenton Johnson’s traditional, rhymed work. I felt that content was more important than technique. That is probably why I could not get into Countee Cullen. He was a superior technician but again there was the matter of rhyme. I also thought Arna Bontemps a fine craftsman, but he usually left me cold. He was also a good personal friend.

JET: Periodically we read of creative writers who say that a particular physical locale is an important stimulus to their creativity. Ernest Gaines, for example, finds in Louisiana not only subject matter but spiritual renewal too. (He calls it that “Louisiana thing that drives me.”) Chicago appears to be such a place for you. Would you comment on Chicago as a place that shapes your poetry?

FMD: I liked the tough, often brutal, image of Chicago projected by Sandburg and felt this was my city. I never liked Kansas when I was growing up—too many restrictions. Kansas City was better. But Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s was a complete challenge. It was big and the home of the Chicago Defender, at that time the nation’s largest Negro newspaper; it was then the jazz capital of the nation. I wanted to paint it in verse. At this time Harlem had plenty of Black writers. But except for Fenton Johnson and possibly two or three more, when I reached Chicago in 1927, it was as barren of Black writers as the Sahara. So I put down my roots to live in Chicago, and I think I had some success in my attempt to mirror Aframerican Chicago in particular. I believe that my verse had Sandburgian directness. I aimed to make my verse easily understood by the average person. I wanted to be easily read and understood. This may have caused some critics to say [that] much of my poetry is actually prose. At the same time others have told me they preferred an intermix of prose and poetry; this prevented boredom. But then, what is poetry to one person can be prose to his neighbor. There is no law preventing the ancient muse from blowing a saxophone.

JET: Your name has never been mentioned as a participant in the 1920s’ New Negro Renaissance (which is often discussed as a New York phenomenon), even though you were publishing poetry in the late 1920s and early 1930s. What was your relationship to those familiar names of the New Negro Renaissance: Hughes, Cullen, Hurston, Toomer, and McKay?

FMD: By staying in Chicago, I avoided being identified with the New Negro Renaissance. I did not want to be part of the Effete East. In 1927, Harlem was the cultural capital of Black America. The nation’s only two Negro magazines, Opportunity and Crisis, were published there. Chicago was rugged, possibly brutal, and unsophisticated. There were also no Black writers there of the quality of those who had flocked to Harlem, except for Fenton Johnson. New York was over-refined, lacking the raw strength of the Midwest. Of course there was jealousy in this evaluation. We sought to compensate for our lack of refinement by dubbing this section of our nation as the Effete East. However, there were so few Black writers around at that time in Chicago that our opinions were unimportant. But Chicago was the jazz capital, and Harlem was trying to reach the status of Chicago with Armstrong, King Oliver, and the others who had migrated there from New Orleans. As time passed and while at the Associated Negro Press, I did meet Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay and later became friends with Hughes. I also knew James Weldon Johnson. While in Atlanta from 1931 to 1934, I did meet Sterling Brown, whose poetry I have continued to admire. And I believe l was the first to publish the fiction of Chester Himes.

JET: Since you did not participate in the patronage system arranged by Alain Locke, Walter White, or W. E. B. Du Bois, how then did you resolve the problem of getting your works published, and what interaction did you have with other writers?

FMD: It was during this period that I began taking my own poetry seriously, mainly because of intellectual prodding from Frances Norton Manning, a Chicago white woman. She was so impressed by my “Chicago’s Congo” that she got in touch with me in Atlanta, encouraged me to write more poetry, and found a publisher, the Black Cat Press of Chicago, for my first two books. When I returned to the Windy City in 1934, I joined the staff of the Associated Negro Press, and after my first book, Black Man’s Verse (1935), I became acquainted with a growing number of writers. The Chicago chapter of the League of American Writers, for example, was organized around 1935 or 1936. I joined at the behest of Richard Wright, whom I had met when the National Negro Congress was formed in Chicago in 1935. We became good friends. He was then a Communist, and I often kidded him about it. He was also on relief and was never too proud to admit it. As a member of the League, I attended all meetings and for the first time was thrown in contact with a number of white writers. Nelson Algren, the novelist, lived a block or so away on Chicago’s South Side. I also came to know Stuart Engstrand, a novelist, and also his wife [Sophia Belzer Engstrand], herself a novelist; Meyer Levin, then a reporter and short-story writer who became a novelist; Paul Romaine, literary critic and collector; and Jack Conroy, editor and novelist. I prevailed upon Conroy, editor of a literary publication called The New Anvil, to publish Frank Yerby’s first short story. Yerby was then a college student in Georgia who came to Chicago each summer to stay with relatives. We shared a mutual interest in photography. (Speaking of photography, I sold Richard Wright his first camera immediately after taking his portrait, which was then used in Time magazine in connection with his book Black Boy. Incidentally, I also read galley proofs of Native Son, part of which was left out by the publisher as too pornographic for that era.) Still another member of the League was Ted Ward, playwright and author of Big White Fog, one of the few Black-written dramas of that day.

We also had a short-lived writers’ group whose members included Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others. I would not consider this to be a Chicago “school” of writers. Gwendolyn Brooks had not yet reached her zenith, nor had Margaret Walker, who read us part of the historical novel she was working on. Richard read us some of his work in Uncle Tom’s Children, his book of short stories he was then writing.

JET: Your poetry is largely social rather than private. It often protests and even declaims in an effort to “clear space” for Black people, truth, justice, and humanity. Since some literary critics have regarded your work as propaganda, not poetry, would you please comment on what you think poetry is, including its function?

FMD: To me, poetry is a subjective way of looking at the world. All poetry worthy of the name is propaganda. Milton’s Paradise Lost is Christian propaganda as is Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” But such works are not likely to be condemned as propaganda because the beliefs expressed in these and similar poems are shared by a majority of the population. The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe is ear candy with a propaganda message glorifying the bizarre and macabre. The poet who locks himself in his ivory tower produces propaganda depicting his inability or unwillingness to cope with the real world. Since I take pride in being considered a social realist, my work will be looked upon as blatant propaganda by some not in sympathy with my goals and as fine poetry by others of equal discernment who agree with me. But that is not to say that the craftmanship is always equal. There may be a variation in technical skill in parts of the same poem. To me, good poetry condenses and distills emotions by painting unusual—perhaps memorable—pictures with words. I know of no completely new thoughts. A poet therefore must find a different way of presenting old ideas. Since I am blues-oriented, I try to be as direct as good blues. This implies social commentary.