Poet of the Harlem Renaissance Countee Cullen—National Poetry Month 2026

 

Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. 

Countee Cullen, leading light of the Harlem Renaissance was orphaned at 16 and was adopted into the home of Harlem’s most important clergyman, the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church.  He took the name of his foster father and enjoyed being at the epicenter of Harlem life.  He was sent to prestigious White schools where he excelled as a scholar and was quickly recognized as a poet. 

In 1923 he graduated from New York University and was accepted to graduate school at Harvard.  He had already published several poems in important magazines and was lauded by White critics as a voice for his race.  That year he published The Ballad of a Black Girl, the first important collection of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance.  It was widely hailed in his own community as well as praised by the literary establishment.  Cullen secured his place in Harlem when he married, to public jubilation, W.E.B. Du Bois’s daughter, uniting the two most influential families in the community. 

Cullen believed that no authentic Black poetic voice had ever been able to establish itself.  He consciously modeled his work on the English Romantics of a hundred years earlier, especially John Keats.  He rejected modernism and literary trends like imagism and free verse.  When his subsequent collections drifted away from the depiction of Black life, he fell out of favor with Black readers who preferred the later blues and jazz infused modernism of Langston Hughes and others.  He ended his long career co-writing plays, including the musical St. Louis Woman which made Pearl Bailey a star when it finally premiered on Broadway in 1947, months after Cullen’s death.

Karenge ya Marenge reflected the radicalism and global views of his father-in-law.

Karenge ya Marenge

Wherein are words sublime or noble?

What Invests one speech with haloed

eminence, Makes it the sesame for all doors

shut, Yet in its like sees but impertinence?

Is it the hue? Is it the cast of eye, The curve of lip or Asiatic breath, Which mark a lesser place for Gandhi’s cry Than “Give me liberty or give me

death!”

Is Indian speech so quaint, so weak, so rude,

So like its land enslaved, denied, and crude, That men who claim they fight for liberty Can hear this battle-shout impassively, Yet to their arms with high resolve have sprung At those same words cried in the English tongue?

 

—Countee  Cullen

Countee Cullen, Karenge ya Marenge from My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen.

 

Karenge ya Marenge by Countee Cullen—National Poetry Month 2023

Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. 

Countee Cullen, leading light of the Harlem Renaissance was orphaned at 16 and was adopted into the home of Harlem’s most important clergyman, the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church.  He took the name of his foster father and enjoyed being at the epicenter of Harlem life.  He was sent to prestigious White schools where he excelled as a scholar and was quickly recognized as a poet.  In 1923 he graduated from New York University and was accepted to graduate school at Harvard.  He had already published several poems in important magazines and was lauded by white critics as a voice for his race.  That year he published The Ballad of a Black Girl, the first important collection of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance.  It was widely hailed in his own community as well as praised by the literary establishment.  Cullen secured his place in Harlem when he married, to public jubilation, W.E.B. Du Bois’s daughter, uniting the two most influential families in the community. 

Cullen believed that no authentic Black poetic voice had ever been able to establish itself.  He consciously modeled his work on the English Romantics of a hundred years earlier, especially John Keats.  He rejected modernism and literary trends like imagism and free verse.  When his subsequent collections drifted away from the depiction of Black life, he fell out of favor with Black readers and ended his long career co-writing plays, including the musical St. Louis Woman which made Pearl Bailey a star when it finally premiered on Broadway in 1947, months after Cullen’s death.

Karenge ya Marenge reflected the radicalism and global views of his father-in-law.

Karenge ya Marenge

Wherein are words sublime or noble?

What Invests one speech with haloed

eminence, Makes it the sesame for all doors

shut, Yet in its like sees but impertinence?

Is it the hue? Is it the cast of eye, The curve of lip or Asiatic breath, Which mark a lesser place for Gandhi’s cry Than “Give me liberty or give me

death!”

Is Indian speech so quaint, so weak, so rude,

So like its land enslaved, denied, and crude, That men who claim they fight for liberty Can hear this battle-shout impassively, Yet to their arms with high resolve have sprung At those same words cried in the English tongue?

 

—Countee  Cullen

Countee Cullen, Karenge ya Marenge from My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen.

 

A Renaissance in Harlem—National Poetry Month 2021

From time to time there are magical, fertile places—communities that for one reason or another fairly burst with new energy and creativity producing artists of all sorts, each seeming to gain strength and speed by the success of their neighbors and associates.  Boston/Cambridge/Concord in the 1840s and ‘50s was one.  Expatriate Paris between the Wars was surely another.

New York City’s Harlem from the years around World War I until the Depression all but wiped out a vigorous Black middle class was such a place and time. 

By the mid-19th Century the old Dutch village on northern Manhattan had been developed as an upper class suburb of the City with mansions lining spacious boulevards.  By the turn of the 20th Century the gentlefolk had fled the encroaching tenement neighborhoods of European immigrants.  In 1910 an entire large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was purchased by a group of Black investors and a church.  It became the seed of a rapidly growing Black community.

In its earliest years it was solidly middle class attracting the cream of an educated elite, professionals, business people, and skilled workers.  When World War I cut off the continuing supply of cheap labor from Europe and war production created unheard of opportunities, tens of thousands of Southern Blacks, chaffing under the deteriorating conditions of the Jim Crow Era, flooded into the neighborhood, as did very culturally distinct immigrants from the Caribbean. 

Some trace the beginning to what would be called the Harlem Renaissance to the 1917 premier of Three Plays for a Negro Theatre by poet Ridgely Torrence.  By 1919 poet Claude McKay was boldly staking out a new militancy in his sonnet If We Must Die.  The ideas of  W.E.B. Du Bois in the NAACP’s journal The Crisis and by Hubert Harrison’s Liberty League in The Voice helped put a political and philosophic stamp on the community.  Marcus Garvey’s nationalist ideas and the Black Churches all contributed.

Archibald John Motley, Jr.  Blues 1929.

And then there was jazz, a new music so powerful that the very street throbbed and which many black intellectuals took up as a shaken fist at Euro-centric culture.

The Harlem Renaissance produced artists of all types—novelists, playwrights, musicians, performers of all types, painters, and sculptors.  But above all, it produced poets.  The most famous was Langston Hughes.  But today I want to feature some of the other voices that still speak powerfully today.

Although the Depression hit Harlem hard and ruined many of the middle class Blacks  who helped sustain the scene, some elements persisted through the 1930s including the jazz clubs, especially those like the Cotton Club which catered to Uptown white swells coming to hear the biggest names in music.  This group of artists photographed in 1934 gathered at Adjust Savage's studio at 306 west 141st in Charles Alston's studio. Here artists from Jacob Lawrence to Morgan and Marvin Smith studied with each other in what became known as the "306" group. Many were able to support themselves as WPA artists.  

Let’s start with Claude McKay, whose defiant poem helped launch the era.  Like several other prominent figures, McKay was an immigrant from the Caribbean; coming from his native Jamaica in 1912 to study at Booker T. Washington famed Tuskegee Institute. He was immediately repelled by the virulent racism he encountered in the Deep South, unlike anything he had encountered at home.  He also rebelled at Washington’s rigid semi-military discipline and his willingness to be—or seem—subservient to the White establishment.  He moved on to study at Kansas State University where he encountered Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk.  Like Du Boise McKay became a Marxist.  He abandoned his studies of agronomy and after a short period as a railroad dining car waiter, arrived in New York determined to pursue a literary career.  In 1919 he joined Max Eastman’s The Liberator where he quickly rose to be joint editor.  The race riots sweeping the country that summer inspired his defiant, seminal poem.

                                Claude McKay.

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

 

—Claude  McKay

 

Countee Cullen.

Countee Cullen came from a very different background than McKay, illustrating the wide diversity in the community.  Orphaned at 16 he was adopted into the home of Harlem’s most important clergyman, the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church.  He took the name of his foster father and enjoyed being at the epicenter of Harlem life.  At the same time he was sent to prestigious White schools were he excelled as a scholar and was quickly recognized as a poet.  In 1923 he graduated from New York University and had been accepted to graduate school at Harvard.  He had already published several poems in important magazines and was lauded by white critics as a voice for his race.  That year he published The Ballad of a Black Girl, the first important collection of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance.  It was widely hailed in his own community as well as praised by the literary establishment.  Cullen secured his place in Harlem when he married, to public jubilation, Du Bois’s daughter, uniting the two most influential families in the community. 

Cullen believed that no authentic Black poetic voice had ever been able to establish itself.  He consciously modeled his work on the English Romantic of a hundred years earlier, especially John Keats.  He rejected modernism and literary trends like imagism and free verse.  When his subsequent collections drifted away from the depiction of Black life, he fell out of favor with Black readers and ended his long career co-writing plays, including the musical St. Louis Woman which made Pearl Bailey a star when it finally premiered on Broadway in 1947, months after Cullen’s death.

 

A Brown Girl Dead

 

With two white roses on her breasts,

   White candles at head and feet,   

Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;

   Lord Death has found her sweet.

 

Her mother pawned her wedding ring   

   To lay her out in white;

She’d be so proud she’d dance and sing   

   To see herself tonight.

 

—Countee Cullen

 

                    James Weldon Johnson.

James Weldon Johnson has been called the elder statesman of the Harlem Renaissance.  More than a generation older than the others, he was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida.  His mother encouraged him to study European literature and music.  After graduating from Atlanta University, he returned to his home town as the principal of a segregated high school.  He was also active in his church choir and began composing hymns.  In 1900 he wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing which became famous as the “Negro National Anthem” after being widely performed by Fisk University’s legendary gospel chorus.  The next year he joined his brother Rosamond in New York City to launch a successful joint career as a songwriting team for the theater.  Based on this experience he published his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, about a musician who turns his back on his racial roots and identity for success in the white world.  

By 1920 he was an organizer for the NAACP and a leading figure in the Harlem community.  Not only did he publish his own poetry, but he became a hugely influential editor and compiler of black verse for anthologies like The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922.  He continued to write, returning to themes of his rural southern roots, until he died in 1938.  His work had helped revive interest in African-American folk traditions.

The Creation

 

And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
“I’m lonely—a
I’ll make me a world.

 

And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

 

Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said, “That’s good!”

 

Then God reached out and took the light in His hands,
And God rolled the light around in His hands
Until He made the sun;
And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said, “That’s good!”

 

Then God himself stepped down --
And the sun was on His right hand,
And the moon was on His left;
The stars were clustered about His head,
And the earth was under His feet.
And God walked, and where He trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.

 

Then He stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.

 

Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around His shoulder.

 

Then God raised His arm and He waved His hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And He said, “Bring forth! Bring forth!”
And quicker than God could drop His hand.
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said,  “That’s good!”

 

Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
He looked at His sun,
And He looked at His moon,
And He looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said, “I’m lonely still.”

 

Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, “I’ll make me a man!”

 

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;

 

Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen,

 

—James Weldon Johnson

Dream Variations by Langston Hughes—National Poetry Month 2020

Langston Hughes by Winold Reiss.

A few days ago I shared verses from some of the readers who were on tap to appear in the Poets In Resistance II program at Tree of Life U.U. Congregation in McHenry, Illinois on March 13 before it fell victim to Coronavirus cancelation.  But that wasn’t the only big event at Tree of Life that I was involved in that was postponed.  Our Social Justice Team had been working for two month on a special Sunday morning service for the Ides of March.  The Promise and Practice of Our Faith was based on materials developed by Black Lives UU which all spoke directly in Black voices, albeit read by members of our White congregation.  The service that Sunday had to be scrubbed as we heeded the call of Unitarian Universalist Association President Susan Frederick-Gray to suspend worship services and meetings at our church buildings—the first U.S. denomination to make that call.  

The service was pushed back one week and became the first worship service we conducted using Zoom technology.  Of course we had to adapt our plans and somewhat truncate the program to allow time for our congregational leadership to discuss the new situation and familiarize worshipers with what for many was new and bewildering technology.

That is My Dream, based on Langston Hughes's poem Dream Variations illustrated by Daniel Miyares.

Alas, one of the things we had to cut was the children’s story from  That Is My Dream! a picture book of Langston Hughes’s poem Dream Variations.  That’s too bad.

Hughes is widely regarded not only as the premier literary voice of the Harlem Renaissance but America’s greatest African American poet and a peer of the likes of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg.  He captured the street life and jazz rhythms of his adopted city, spoke directly to his people, and offered them comfort and hope.  As his fame spread and he attracted White readers he also boldly laid out his grievances in work like Let America Be America Again, I, Too, Sing America, Harlem, and Brotherly Love which was inspired by the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Aaron Douglas's painting captures the vibrancy of the Harlem Renaissance in which Langston Hughes was a central figure.

Before he died in New York City in 1967 at the age of 61, Hughes had mentored generations of young writers and afterwards inspired new ones.

He began speaking of a young boy.

Dream Variations

To fling my arms wide

In some place of the sun,

To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done.

Then rest at cool evening

Beneath a tall tree

While night comes on gently,

    Dark like me—

That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide

In the face of the sun,

Dance! Whirl! Whirl!

Till the quick day is done.

Rest at pale evening . . .

A tall, slim tree . . .

Night coming tenderly

    Black like me.

—Langston Hughes

In a related short poem, Hughes offered a warning as well as hope

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams 

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

—Langston Hughes

April Celebrates Jazz and Poetry—A Match Made in Harlem

An assortment of Jazz Apreciation Month Posters.

It has come to my attention that not only is April National Poetry Month, but, at least since 2001 it is also Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) which is marked by a music festival sponsored by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and including special events and programs sponsored by schools, local government arts councils, and other organizations.  The idea was the brain child of John Edward Hasse, PhD, curator of the museum and fittingly initially funded by a grant from the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation.

Jazz and modern American poetry grew up together in the 20th Century—artistic kissing cousins each enabling and encouraging the other in ways both overt and subtle.  They can comfortably share a month long appreciation. 

It began, as so much rich American culture did during the legendary Harlem Renaissance.  Many poets including Langston Hughes captured the rhythms and sounds of the smoky clubs and dance halls along with an exuberant life style that went along with it.

Langston Hughes by Winold Riess

The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

He did a lazy sway. . . .

He did a lazy sway. . . .

To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

With his ebony hands on each ivory key

He made that poor piano moan with melody.

O Blues!

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

Sweet Blues!

Coming from a black man’s soul.

O Blues!

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—

“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,

Ain’t got nobody but ma self.

I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’

And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.

He played a few chords then he sang some more—

“I got the Weary Blues

And I can’t be satisfied.

Got the Weary Blues

And can’t be satisfied—

I ain’t happy no mo’

And I wish that I had died.”

And far into the night he crooned that tune.

The stars went out and so did the moon.

The singer stopped playing and went to bed

While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

—Langston Hughes

 

From jazz poem to jazz cantata--composer Herbert Chappell used Vachel Lindsay's verse.

Soon White cats were catching the bug like Vachel Lindsey who had once kindly encouraged young Hughes. 

The Daniel Jazz

Inscribed to Isadora Bennett Let the singer train the audience to roar like lions, and to join in the refrain:—“Go chain the lions down,” before he begins to lead them in this jazz.
Beginning with a strain of Dixie. Darius the Mede was a king and a wonder.
His eye was proud, and his voice was thunder.
He kept bad lions in a monstrous den.
He fed up the lions on Christian men.
With a touch of Alexander’s ragtime band. Daniel was the chief hired man of the land.
He stirred up the jazz in the palace band.
He whitewashed the cellar. He shovelled in the coal.
And Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”
Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”
Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”
Daniel was the butler, swagger and swell.
He ran up stairs. He answered the bell.
And he would let in whoever came a-calling:—
Saints so holy, scamps so appalling.
“Old man Ahab leaves his card.
Elisha and the bears are a-waiting in the yard.
Here comes Pharo and his snakes a-calling.
Here comes Cain and his wife a-calling—
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego for tea.
Here comes Jonah and the whale, and the sea.
Here comes St. Peter and his fishing pole.
Here comes Judas and his silver a-calling.
Here comes old Beelzebub a-calling.”
And Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”
Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”
Daniel kept a-praying:—“Lord save my soul.”
His sweetheart and his mother were Christian and meek.
They washed and ironed for Darius every week.
One Thursday he met them at the door:—
Paid them as usual, but acted sore.
He said:—“Your Daniel is a dead little pigeon.
He’s a good hard worker, but he talks religion.”
And he showed them Daniel in the lion’s cage.
Daniel standing quietly, the lions in a rage.
His good old mother cried:—
“Lord save him.”
And Daniel’s tender sweetheart cried:—
“Lord save him.”
And she was a golden lily in the dew.
And she was as sweet as an apple on the tree.
And she was as fine as a melon in the corn-field,
Gliding and lovely as a ship on the sea,
Gliding and lovely as a ship on the sea.
And she prayed to the Lord:—
“Send Gabriel. Send Gabriel.”
King Darius said to the lions:—
“Bite Daniel. Bite Daniel.
Bite him. Bite him. Bite him.”
Here the audience roars with the leader. Thus roared the lions:—
“We want Daniel, Daniel, Daniel,
We want Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”
And Daniel did not frown,
Daniel did not cry.
He kept on looking at the sky.
And the Lord said to Gabriel:—
The audience sings this with the leader, to the old negro tune. “Go chain the lions down,
Go chain the lions down.
Go chain the lions down.
Go chain the lions down.”
And Gabriel chained the lions,
And Gabriel chained the lions,
And Gabriel chained the lions,
And Daniel got out of the den,
And Daniel got out of the den,
And Daniel got out of the den.
And Darius said:—“You’re a Christian child,
Darius said:—“You’re a Christian child,
Darius said:—“You’re a Christian child,”
And gave him his job again,
And gave him his job again,
And gave him his job again —Vachel Lindsay
Archibald John Motley, Jr.'s Nighylife. Lindsay’s fellow Illinois bard Carl Sandburg, a guitar player and singer himself, also got into the scene in several poems. Jazz Fantasia Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen. Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go hushahusha-hush with the slippery sand-paper. Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome tree-tops, moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang! you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns, tin cans—make two people fight on the top of a stairway and scratch each other’s eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs. Can the rough stuff … now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo … and the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars … a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills … go to it, O jazzmen. —Carl Sandburg   Bird--Charlie Parker Bebop king. Post-World War II America ushered in the eras of bebop and beatniks—a whole new generation grooving in whole news ways.  Take Jack Kerouac’s muse on the passing of a seminal reed man. Charley Parker Charlie Parker looked like Buddha Charlie Parker, who recently died Laughing at a juggler on the TV After weeks of strain and sickness, Was called the Perfect Musician. And his expression on his face Was as calm, beautiful, and profound As the image of the Buddha Represented in the East, the lidded eyes The expression that says “All Is Well” This was what Charlie Parker Said when he played, All is Well. You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning Like a hermit’s joy, or Like the perfect cry of some wild gang At a jam session, “Wail, Wop” Charlie burst his lungs to reach the speed Of what the speedsters wanted And what they wanted Was his eternal Slowdown —Jack Kerouac   Jayne Cortez, who was the widow of Ornnett Coleman died in 2012.  She often read and performed with her band, an electro-funk modern jazz group called the Firespitters. Then there is Jayne Cortez whose beat infused work as a poet, performance artist, feminist, and activist continued to flourish in the post-beat era.  She shows that you don’t have to mention jazz or even music—the very words percolate with riffs and improvisations complete with spaces for the horn and slap bass solos… I Am New York City i am new york city here is my brain of hot sauce my tobacco teeth my mattress of bedbug tongue legs aparthand on chin war on the roofinsults pointed fingerspushcarts my contraceptives all look at my pelvis blushing i am new york city of blood police and fried pies i rub my docks red with grenadine and jelly madness in a flow of tokay my huge skull of pigeons my seance of peeping toms my plaited ovaries excuse me this is my grime my thigh of steelspoons and toothpicks i imitate no one i am new york city of the brown spit and soft tomatoes give me my confetti of flesh my marquee of false nipples my sideshow of open beaks in my nose of soot in my ox bled eyes in my ear of Saturday night specials i eat ha ha hee hee and ho ho i am new york city never change never sleep never melt my shoes are incognito cadavers grow from my goatee look i sparkle with shit with wishbones my nickname is glue-me take my face of stink bombs my star spangled banner of hot dogs take my beer can junta my reptilian ass of footprints and approach me through life approach me through death approach me through my widow’s peak through my split ends my asthmatic laughapproach me through my wash rag half anklehalf elbow massage me with your camphor tears salute the patina and concrete of my rat tail wig face upface downpiss into the bite of our handshake i am new york city my skillet-head friend my fat-bellied comrade citizens break wind with me —Jayne Cortez      The release of the last surviving Scottsboro boy, Clarence Noris, on the orders of Alabama governor George Wallace in 1976 inspired a  poem by Everett Hoagland. And finally one from an old poet/friend I have never met but long admired, Everett Hoagland who found jazz riffs in a newspaper clipping with whiffs of an old injustice in his recent collection The  Music and Other Selected Poems. The Last Scottsboro “Boy” You might have thought justice was a jive, cracked tune, sung with a forked tongue, like the Liberty Bell’s. But you held life like a steel guitar, your jail cell a twelve-bar blues, and strummed it: All people should be free. In Alabama, the governor’s pardon, Wallace gives you some skin. His representative and Miss Belle try to ring Liberty, but it’s Alabama and you know it’s a blues tune: Clarence Norris, aged 63. I have no hate; I like all people. All people should be free.  I wish those other boys were around to see… —Everett Hoagland 1976 From The Music and Other Selected Poems by Everett Hoagland, North Star Nova Press.  Copyright Everett Hoagland, 2015.