The Message is in the Melody: An Interview with Dudley Randall
- The Message is in the Melody: An Interview with Dudley Randall
This interview was conducted in the poet’s home in Detroit, Michigan, on November 21, 1997.
You have had many careers—poet, publisher, librarian, professor. How do you describe yourself? Did you enjoy some kinds of work more than others?
Maybe if I’m remembered, I’d be remembered as a poet. Some of my poems are in print; some of them appear in anthologies, two or three of them, so it’s likely that people will remember me as a poet.
That’s how people would remember you, but is that really how you would like to be remembered? Is that what you enjoyed most—being a poet more than being a librarian or a publisher, for example?
Yes, I think my career as a librarian sort of declined; I lost some interest in it when I became a poet-in-residence at the University of Detroit. From then on, I was more interested in poetry than I was in a librarianship.
Would you say that your father’s having been a minister influenced your facility with and love of language? If so, to what extent?
Yes, I think so. There were a lot of books around the house, some of them in poetry, and I was free to read them. I developed a love of language, a love of poetry, by reading his books. He loved poetry: he would recite it; he put it in his sermons.
He put poetry in his sermons! Do you remember some of the poems he used?
No, I don’t remember; it was a long time ago.
Perhaps it was Dunbar; his poems were quite popular in the black community at that time. [End Page 438]
I don’t think it was Dunbar; it would have been something more like Shakespeare.
Your father has certainly influenced you. Would you say there are others who inspired you to write?
When I was a kid, I mostly wrote alone; I didn’t tell anybody about it. It wasn’t until I became older that I met people about my own age who were interested in poetry. One of them was Robert Hayden, and we would show each other our poems, talk about poetry together.
Is Hayden still alive?
No. He died in 1980.
I’m familiar with his poems, especially “Runagate Runagate.” Where did you meet Hayden?
He lived in Detroit, too. We were introduced by a friend of his who worked at the YMCA. I knew this fellow, and he said, “I know a man who is interested in poetry, too. I think you’d like to meet him.” So we were introduced and found we had a mutual interest in poetry. I must have been in my twenties. It was in the 1930s.
Because of your mutual interest in poetry, would you say that your poems were similar in content and style? If so, how?
In the beginning I was more interested in the metrical structure of verse in prosody because I had a high school teacher who taught us to scan verse. Hayden was more interested in phrasing. His earlier influences were minor poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie and Sara Teasdale. Later, he was influenced by student John Malcolm Brinsin and Professor W.H. Auden. I would not say our poems are similar.
Poetry and other writing—but especially poetry—makes use of rhythmic patterns of language. Did your living here in Detroit, the home of Motown, influence the musicality of your writing in any way? In other words, did “the Motown Sound” have any effect on your writing? How?
No. I don’t think so. I never wanted to write songs, except for one period in my life. It must have been about the 1980s. I tried to write a musical comedy or a musical, but it didn’t work out.
What happened? Didn’t you finish it? [End Page 439]
No, I would like to have...
