Books: Love Withheld

NEW NEGRO POETS: USA edited by Langston Hughes. 127 pages. Indiana University Press. $4.95.

"Every Negro poet has 'something to say,' " wrote Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950, hanging out a precarious shingle for all her Negro colleagues. "Simply because he is a Negro, he cannot escape having some important things to say." This same claim is invoked in the foreword to this collection of 37 new Negro poets, but what the book proves is happily quite the opposite: it is because they are poets, not Negroes, that they have something to say.

The poets are all young, but none of them seems to feel obliged to say something Negro, and their apparent lack of concern for the social revolution that will certainly be their generation's accomplishment may seem puzzling. But with the racial struggle now moved into the open, the poets are free to turn their thoughts to other matters, and they write with an invigorating rustle.

Some of the poems, of course, are protest pieces, and a few even come in the tired, familiar voice of the hipster:

It is time for everybody to swing (Life don't mean a thing if it don't swing)

But the most striking qualities of the poems that address the racial crisis are their personal depth and indirection: the pain their words imply could be anyone's. Some have the ring of ghetto humor: I stand in my low east window looking down.

Am I in the wrong slum? But by looking out another window, a poet such as LeRoi Jones perceives a malaise beyond sociology:

What I know of the mind

seems to end here;

Just outside my face.

I wish some weird looking animal

would come along.

Expectedly, 37 new poets turn out to be about 30 too many, but among the best are some whose work deserves a longer hearing than the book provides—David Henderson, Audre Lorde, Conrad Kent Rivers, and the late Ray Durem. Jones, in particular, has a wit-and bitter whimsy that raises the simplest words to the level of poetry:

Each morning

I go down

to Gansevoort St.

and stand on the docks.

I stare out

at the horizon

until it gets up

and comes to embrace

me. I

make believe

it is my father.

This is known

as genealogy.