Lines of Healing Song

by Michael S. Harper

Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems. Michael S. Harper. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

The title of Michael S. Harper's New and Collected Poems, Songlines in Michaeltree, suggests his deep-rooted connection with the songs of history and ancestry. Harper alludes to the Australian aboriginal songlines - the ancient invisible pathways across the continent which the ancestors dream-traveled in order to sing the world into existence. Michaeltree, a name given the poet by his four year old godson, resonates with both the simplicity of the child naming the world, and the incredible reach of the "TREEMOREANCIENTTHANEDEN," as he quotes in "Corrected Review."

Harper's work resounds with the highly personal and yet simultaneously reaches into the depths of history, often creating an electrical charge between the two. The titles of the eight earlier collections which contribute to this volume contain this charge and often sound like poems themselves: Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970), History is Your Own Heartbeat (1971), Song: I Want a Witness (1972), Debridement (1973), Nightmare Begins Responsibility (1975), Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems (1977), Healing Song for the Inner Ear (1985), Honorable Amendments (1995). His unique use of rather elaborate footnotes to the poems at the end of the book allow a deeper glimpse into personal and historical circumstances which gave rise to the poems.

The lines of song, or song-lines in this collection carry us through a life of witness, of testimony - through deeply personal moments, as well as historical moments made deeply personal. We feel the immeasurable fear and loss of the poet's infant sons in "Nightmare Begins Responsibility":

I place these numbed wrists to the pane
watching white uniforms whisk over
him in the tube-kept
prison
fear what they will do in experiment...
Say it for two sons gone
say nightmare, say it loud
panebreaking heartmadness:
nightmare begins responsibility.

We have a sense of deep family influence throughout Harper's body of work, extending into his later poems such as "My Mother's Bible," in which each child's name had its own page. The poet took this book:

to the Transvaal

and out of Africa
to Latvia

onto the Natchez Trace
into Tuscaloosa...

Other poems sing the sorrows of a country's painful history and travel beyond these borders to the sorrows of other places as well. In "The Militance of a Photograph in the Passbook of a Bantu under Detention," he enters the painful history of South Africa via a photograph and a letter, naming and identifying with the places which reverberate with their violent history. Likewise, "American History," an early poem of Harper's, marks what will be a major subject for his life work, and carries the charged compression and juxtaposition of incidents which characterizes so much of his work:

Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
remind me of five hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under water
in Charleston harbor
so redcoats couldn't find them.
Can't find what you can't see
can you?

This piece has the quality of an unforgettable photograph, or rather, a double exposure. These photo-graphs mapping history are often linked in a series which builds in intensity - different movements of a musical score. This is especially the case in the longer poems, such as "Photographs: Negatives," a sequence in nine parts, in which Harper again brings together the very personal reality of his daughter's birth with reflections on the ancient burial ground on which their house stands. Quintessential Harper, the poem moves through many layers of history and connects the birth of his child with all that has occurred on this land.

Like the aboriginal songlines, Harper's work is deeply influenced by a sense of place. He writes of American history and of human history with a poetry of witness: Song: I Want a Witness, his third collection is named. Harper's poetry provides that witness, that testimony. Yet it also offers healing. His "Healing Song," an honorific for Robert Hayden in Images of Kin is echoed in his following collection, Healing Song for the Inner Ear. In the latter book, Harper pays homage to the voices which have given him strength. "Double Elegy" celebrates what Harper terms the "poetic nexus" of Robert Hayden and James Wright. "You two men like to confront/the craters of history and spillage" the poet recognizes. He addresses them again in other poems in this collection, the epistolary approach often being evoked by a specific place. He addresses "Jim Wright" in "News from Fort Ancient," among the Indian burial mounds, and then finds himself "In Hayden's Collage," where Hayden would

...force the palate in the lion's
den - to find God in all the light
the paintbrush would let in -
the proper colors,
the corn, the wheat, the valley,
dike, the shadows, and the heart...

"Alice" from Nightmare Begins Responsibility, evokes Alice Walker's journey to find and honor Zora Neale Hurston's grave in Florida:

You stand waist-high in the snakes
beating the weeds for the gravebed...
looking for Zora, and when she speaks...
she calls you her distant cousin...

Floods of truth flow from your limbs...
And for this I say your name, Alice
my grandmother's name, your name...
And where I speak from now
on higher ground of her risen
black marker where you have written
your name in hers, and in mine.

Harper's work has a deep sense of this naming of lineage and tradition - of writers, but also of the great influence of musicians, particularly jazz artists. Songlines in Michaeltree conveys that life inside the music. The book opens with the song-inspired Dear John, Dear Coltrane and closes with his new poems, "Release: Kind of Blue" and "A Coltrane Poem: September 23, 1998." His rhythms throughout the book are deeply influenced by his ear for this music. One can hear his inhabitation of Coltrane singing through the terrors of the South, with his poignant refrain, "a love supreme":

you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme...

The book ends with a reiteration of this lineage. In "Release": "Because you cannot go back/ resonance builds." And in "A Coltrane Poem":

"Autumn Leaves" without a bandstand
for your vigorous arc of light

though it is bright and colorful
in the extremities of music

Michael S. Harper's poems reach the extremities of this music, which trace back through so many stories become one. Harper's songs are deeply American, ancestral, human. His work honors many lineages, which join his voice in traveling the songlines of our history, bearing witness, honoring beauty, and healing the inner ear.