The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962–1975: A Research Compendium (review)

Valerie Boyd relates that when Zora Neale Hurston coined the word "Negrotarian" for influential white humanitarians who took an interest in black life, she was thinking of Annie Nathan Meyer, Fannie Hurst, and Carl Van Vechten. Since the 1920s the list of white patrons has grown ever longer, the controversies have grown ever more intricate and intractable, and cross-racial collaboration is now a highly charged academic topic. While the Ramey-Breman compendium, The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962—1975, accomplishes a number of things, it inescapably adds Paul Breman to the ranks of John Lomax, Andrew Dietz, and the rest of Hurston's Negrotarians. In "The Heritage Series: An Introduction" Ramey frames the Breman enterprise forthrightly: "In the 1960s and 1970s one of the most important publishing outlets for African American poetry was an unlikely venture run by a Dutchman in London" (1). Running between 1962 and 1975, the Heritage Series produced twenty-seven volumes of poetry. Breman's conception of heritage as a bridging of past, present, and future led him to focus on two groups of writers, Harlem Renaissance writers who never had published a book and new poets. In the first group the salient figures were Arna Bontemps, Waring Cuney, and Frank Horne. The new poets of the 1960s and 1970s included a variety of innovators, many from the Umbra group. Eventually, the generational scheme receded as an organizing principle, and poets who had not received much attention but fell between the generations were included. Ramey summarizes the impact of Breman's venture into publishing African American poets in this way: "The Heritage Series rapidly developed a reputation, often spread among the poets by word of mouth… as a venue which was more open than some other outlets to the various styles being explored by some black poets, which printed their work in a consistent and attractive format, and whose publisher was known not to tamper editorially with their manuscripts" (6).

The research compendium contains five sections: eleven original literary essays; excerpts from Breman's memoir and brief accounts by the Heritage poets of their experiences with Breman; out of print or previously unpublished poems by twenty of the poets; out of print literary credos by the Heritage poets from the period between 1962 and 1975; and bibliographic materials including a bibliography of the publications of every Heritage Series poet and a summary of the Heritage Series Archive. The chief limitation of this volume is that it is not equally attentive to each of the twenty-seven poets, and that where there is attention to an individual it can vary considerably in the methods of presentation and in critical analysis. Ishmael Reed, Fenton Johnson, Mari Evans, and other poets barely register in the compendium, being represented in some cases only by Breman's brief accounts of their pamphlets. To give another example, for Russell Atkins there is a detailed, sensitive, and far-ranging ten page essay by Aldon Nielsen; three poems; and an informative paragraph on Atkins's place in the series by Paul Breman, but no statement on poetics or treatment in the memoir section. Many of the essays included in the volume are by strong scholars who provide authoritative readings of the poets, with topics including Ray Durem's politics, Dolores Kendricks's spirituality, Clarence Major's travels, Russell Atkins's experimentalism, and Dudley Randall's publishing career. However, once the unique contribution of the Heritage Series compendium is taken into account, this inequity of treatment dwindles as a concern. As Ramey observes in the final paragraph of her introduction, there are a number of factors that have come into play in the reception of black American poetry that are reflected in this compendium in a determining manner. In Ramey's words, "Some contributors to this book have recently produced significant critical studies, anthologies, and essay collections calling urgently for conservation of all types of twentieth-century African American...