Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Movement by Derik Smith (review)

CLA JOURNAL 121 Book Reviews Smith, Derik. Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Movement. University of Michigan Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 978-0-472-05393-3 $34.95 Paperback. Derik Smith’s Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Movement, winner of the 2019 College Language Association’s Creative Scholarship Award, is a long overdue re-appreciation of the modernist poet whose reputation and regard have been marginalized over the last half century. On its face, the book is a valiant, necessary, and largely successful attempt to restore and promote Hayden’s legacy and to secure for Hayden a less marginalized, more central and celebrated place in the canon of African American poetry. The waning of Hayden’s reputation is universally cited as having begun at the Fisk Writers Conference in 1966 when Hayden objected to being called a “Black poet” and, according to the well circulated narrative, was challenged and subsequently silenced by attendees identified with the Black Arts Movement (BAM). Smith begins his reconsideration of Hayden at this locus as well, but challenges the narrative on several points, insisting, with some credible evidence, that despite being looked at askance, even dismissively, by many younger, more militant Black poets like Haki R. Madhubuti, Hayden continued to participate in BAM discussions of poetry and poetics, albeit often as a voice of dissent. Further, Smith points out that Hayden reached several high points in his 40-year career as a poet during the years of the Black Arts Movement, including being named Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress in 1976. Yet, even this distinction did not prevent knowledge of Hayden from being limited in later years to a few frequently anthologized poems, principally “Those Winter Sundays” and “Runagate, Runagate,” and being largely ignored at the “Furious Flower” Conference that convened at James Madison University in 1994, arguably the largest and most significant celebration of Black poetry ever. Smith delves into the several reasons often given for the decline in Hayden’s reputation in the years since 1966, citing Hayden’s insistence on aesthetic distance from his subject, his reverence for western literary traditions, his eschewing of vernacular language, his move from Fisk, a noted HBCU, to the “ivory tower” of University of Michigan, a PWI, his preferred mode of dress and affect (bow ties and pipe-smoking), even his embracement of the Baha’i Faith, as if all of these were evidence of Hayden’s attempt to distance himself from his blackness.Through nine succinct,well-researched, pithy,and beautifully written chapters,Smith renders these arguments at best impotent, providing not only impressive analyses of a number of Hayden’s poems but also an astute discussion of Hayden’s poetics and the importance of both to the burgeoning canon of AfricanAmerican poetry in the 21st Century.Further,Smith argues that despite Hayden’s absence from discussions and celebrations of Black poetry (being relegated often to chronological “lists” of Black poets), his legacy is considerable and seen most clearly through his literary heirs, including Rita Dove, Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Tretheway, Nikky Finney, and other Black poets who value the writerly aesthetic; who revere the histories of black people, though they too maintain 122 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews an aesthetic distance; and who have largely moved away from the performative aspect in verse that was so much prized by the BAM. Certainly among Smith’s most impressive chapters is Chapter 2: “The ‘Cosmic Hero’: Hayden’s Baha’i Faith,” a sincere and almost reverent account of Hayden’s journey from the Black Baptist Church of his youth in Detroit’s Paradise Valley ghetto to his embracement of the little known religion of the Baha’i Faith some years later, which Smith posits is a veritable search for enlightenment. In careful analyses of several of Hayden’s poems published after his 1955 conversion to the Baha’i Faith, including the well-regarded “Words in the Mourning Time,” Smith patiently sets forth just how much Hayden’s poetry was influenced by his faith. As Howard Rambsy points out, this chapter“provides arguably the most in-depth...