David Henderson (1) (1942–)

Everyone’s list of great works of literature - no matter what genre, no matter what the circumference - has at least one Unexpected, a work or a writer totally unexpected. Asked to make a list of Indispensable Poems in English for a potential adult-education class, I came up with poets and poems that were mostly to be expected: a Shakespearean sonnet, Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and the like. From the late 20th century I allowed myself poems by Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, James Dickey, Howard Nemerov, and (perhaps somewhat unexpect, by a favorite of mine) Wendell Berry. But one would have been totally Unexpected - among poets writing in English, even American poets, even contemporary American, even among African American poets. But to me it speaks not just for my generation, but for all time, not just for Black Americans, but for all people, not just about Harlem, but about all our tribes, whether on streets or rivers, whether among neon lights or the shadows of jungles. It’s called “Egyptian Book of the Dead.” It’s from a 1970 collection by David Henderson, called De Mayor of Harlem.

The title and the first few lines of the poem connect it with ancient scriptures, raise it to mythic transcendence:

pharisees come bloom
water eddys the twilight air
blue for music
red for fire
look out along the rooftops
ancient cities pop up
old testaments
tribes muster at gray street corners
sparks of cigarettes gleam the glass arcade
wine bottles libate the sidewalk

I cannot do justice to the simplicity of the imagery and yet its profundity with just the few lines that copyright restrictions will permit me to include. But already you see the juxtaposition of cigarettes and wine bottles with pharisees and ancient tribes; already the rooftops and arcade, the flames and the libation transform the present-day into time immemorial. Even today, as I reflect on the poem almost a half century after it was written, all I would have to do would be flick the television screen or scroll the internet immediately to find these gray streets and gleaming arcades, the mustering tribes and the “blooming” pharisees. This very week they are protesting on my campus as articulately as Moses and triggering a backlash as dangerous as Pharaoh’s. Today, as in 1970, as in ancient Egypt, one hears the whisper issuing forth more and more ardently:

death is a beautiful thing
done in the right way

Parisians just yesterday (November 13, 2015) witnessed - suffered - “a blaze of trumpets” and “a blossom of fire.”

So, yes, I would insist that Henderson’s “Egyptian Book of the Dead,” and poems like it, are indispensable. No collection of poems written in English would be complete without one. This poem is followed by eight brief, untitled poems, using similar images not unlike ones I’ve cited here:

de bar room was full of black men . . . .

the black boy
. . . . .
bopping
into the garden of music
looking for isis /

tenor roars
obligato . . . .

cakewalking
into plumes of power

in the mist of bessie smith . . . .

The title poem, “Walk with De Mayor of Harlem,” sets the prophetic tone of the collection as well as its imagistic style. We should have heard the prophet in the 1960s, when he published this poem; at last, at least, we should hear him now. That poem concludes with a “blood ruckus”,

that night
there will e monsoon rains over harlem
black panther bonnevilles prowling
from block to block
helicopters colliding with tenements
in orange surprise

Born and raised in Harlem, Henderson (1942- ), has been widely published, has taught from coast to coast, has been active in arts movements, especially in the Lower East Side, and is known for his biography of Jimi Hendrix. I wish his poetry had been more widely anthologized and that his voice were heard across the land. If I could sponsor a symposium of living poets, more or less of my own generation, I would invite four: Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and David Henderson. They speak for us and our age as eloquently as Wordsworth and Coleridge did for theirs or Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes for theirs. In that Paradise of Poets . . . .… (más)