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116 position, 1917–27, the author, with the support of the black editor and anthologist William Stanley Braithwaite, took on the project of editing and anthologizing black poetry from the modern era, situating its beginning with Paul Laurence Dunbar. Johnson’s editorial vision produced the trailblazing Book of American Negro Poetry, first published in 1922 by Harcourt Brace with his substantial preface, just shy of fifty pages in length. Added to this editorial work were the two equally groundbreaking volumes, The Book of American Negro Spirituals and The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals, published by Viking and issued in 1925 and 1926, a collaborative project between Johnson and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, the first book with a preface by Johnson of forty pages. His anthology of black poetry became a standard and was reissued in 1931 with a revised and expanded preface by Johnson, along with a study guide for the poetry by Sterling Brown. The Book of American Negro Spirituals—especially the first volume— was also very well received in a competitive market for anthologies of the increasingly popular spirituals. Johnson placed copies of this latter work in the hands of modernist writers (and anthologizers) such as Louis Untermeyer and Gertrude Stein. 5 framing Black expressive Culture prefaces to The Book of American Negro Poetry, The Book of American Negro Spirituals, and God’s Trombones When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest, and the medicine man. . . . [E]xtemporizing in response to the exigencies of the situation in which he finds himself, he is confronting, acknowledging, and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there. —Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture In the period of Johnson’s most vigorous poetic com- f r a m I N g B l a c k e x P r e S S I v e c u l t u r e 117 Johnson’s anthologizing of black expressive arts in The Book of American Negro Poetry, The Book of American Negro Spirituals, The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals, and God’s Trombones is informed by World War I, the Armistice, and Johnson’s personal loss of his mother, who suffered a lingering death from September 1918 to early January 1919. His anthologizing practices overlap with his autobiographical impulses, found interspersed in the prefaces to each of these works, where autobiography simultaneously pays homage to Helen Louise Johnson and locates Johnson in his writing. In this period of composition and anthologizing, Johnson placed himself in literary apprenticeships to the cultural and literary pundit Henry Louis Mencken and the poetry anthologist William Stanley Braithwaite.Yet Johnson never fully embraced the advice of either man. His writing from this period demonstrates the formation of a distinct poetics of form, a way to talk about the self and collective black expressive practices, such that he dissolved traditional distinctions such as national versus racial identity, oral versus literate culture, and high modern versus low folk/primitive forms.1 As Brent Edwards has shown, Johnson’s poetics hinges upon a theory of transcription. A key issue in African American literary criticism, transcription calls attention to the larger concern of phonography or phonographic voice.2 Working from the understanding that the traditional formal division of literature and culture between orality and literacy cannot account for black creative expression, phonography calls attention to discrepancies, incongruities, and “telling inarticulacy.”3 Moreover, as Nathaniel Mackey writes, tracing phonographic voice through writers not usually placed next to each other in the long-standing critical rubrics that form and inform our conversations about writing, literature, and difference encourages an appreciation of heterogeneity, “resonances and dissonances, the interstitial play between fit and non-fit, . . . [and] non-totalizing drift.”4 Johnson uses phonographic voice in the prefaces to all of his anthologies and to God’s Trombones to free black expressive culture from the binary trap of racial determinism or universalism and offers up instead a notion of “play” and constant motion: a claim to both modernity and modernism, unable to be fully “fixed” or transcribed on the page. This phonography represents a kind of indeterminacy—a resistance to fixity in race or form that links black expressive culture to American modernism without subscribing to its potentially objectifying, freeze- [3.129.67...

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