Michael Harper

Michael Harper’s Images of Kin is a unique collection of poems that illustrates the great influence that both people of history and music have had over his poetry. Harper’s goal is to connect the reader to ancestors of the past to make route for a better future. In this collection Harper writes of “people known, unknown, famous and infamousвЂ"known to him personally or kin to him by virtue of his possession of history, biography and autobiography, of music and sport,” (John Brown 749).

Many of the poems in Images of Kin, suggest to you the value and appreciation that Michael Harper has of history. He has an entire book/section dedicated to history titled History is Your Own Heart Beat. Harper’s values of history are demonstrated in his poetry and shows that literature to him is a study of comparative humanity; meaning “the conscious concern with one’s inner development, which is to say the maturation, the flowering, of a vibrant interior life,” (Rowell 789). This is a strategy that helps him decide what stories are worth telling; by their potential to form a bond and connection with the reader. For instance, Harper will write “homages” dedicated to specific people that impacted him in some way. Many of the poems also reveal the intersection Harper makes between music, history, and the Afro-American culture.

A majority of Harper’s poetry displays a historical consciousness of the ability that ancestors of the past have on manipulating the present (Joseph Brown 213). In his poem, “Continuous Visit,” Harper refers to his ancestors and how their presence is still with him. This poem refers to his own special place within a circle of witnessing saints (Joseph Brown 218). Harper uses imagery to set a nature scene with ambivalent detail with phrases like, sunflower patches and weedy ditches and the description of bass linked with “cast frogs, hooked through/their mouths” visualizing the bass as uncatchable. The image of vivid oak trees is also used to paint a backdrop in the nature scene for the reader. In the poem Harper draws a comparison to the oak trees being dead but then being used to create paper to write and read chronicles on. This refers to the lines “you read chronicles/from typed peach paper/last years spirits/ pitched in its threshing, blood from my structure of my family.” The image of trees dying is being used to symbolize that when his ancestors were alive they served a purpose and when they died they continue to serve a purpose of guidance just in a different form. It is the same as the living tree’s purpose was to provide life, shade, and shelter, but once dead it served another purpose of documenting life’s histories.

This structure is race as it is blood,

long as frozen lake

building messages on typewritten paper,

faces of my ancestors,

warm in winter only

as their long scars touch ours.

In this verse the structure that Harper is referring to is his family structure. This verse shows how Harper feels it is important to connect with ancestors of our past to better the future. The line where it says, “ as their long scars touch ours” is telling the reader that we can learn from the pain and suffering our ancestors went through by relating it to your own for direction in how to overcome it. For Harper, poetry is the “prophetic vision that allows him to see into history and bend the crooked into straight, to redeem what has been lost,” (Joseph Brown 211). He views himself as a prophet that the ancestors use to keep their voices heard and never forgotten.

This idea goes along with another poem titled “Alice.” This poem makes reference to a story Alice Walker told concerning Zora Neale Hurston as well. The poem discusses the inspiration that Hurston provided Walker in her poetry career, along with impact the two women had over the African American culture with their “words on pages.” The last verse goes as follows;

And for this I say your name: Alice,

My grandmother’s name, your name,

Conjured in snake-infested field

Where Zora Neale welcomed you home,

And where I speak from now

On higher ground of her risen

Black marker where you have written

Your name in her, and in mine (Harper 66).

This last verse explains how even thought these two women who were great inspirations to him throughout his life in both his poetry and culture have passed away, he will continue to speak their words from a “higher ground.” Harper writes about people of the history who have inspired him to call upon them for comfort and direction (J.A. Brown 211). In this poem he also uses Walker’s words of her own within the poem to paint the picture for the reader. In the line about a “snake infested field,” Harper is referring to people who are against contemporary artists like Walker and Harper himself. He is calling upon Alice and Zora here for guidance to overcome these snakes who are trying to consume the modern poet. By using Walker’s words, he is able to tell a story through her perspective, as goes in the following verse.

..and when she speaks

From her sunken chamber to call

You to her side, she calls

You her distant cousin, her sister

Come to mark her burial place

With bright black stone (Harper 67)

This stanza is telling the story through Alice Walker who is asking Zora for help finding the grave. Zora Neale Hurston in this poem is called upon not only to guide Alice Walker but Michael Harper as well. It shows the connections that Harper is able to make between poets and how they guide and help each other through tough times of the modern African American artist. This poem is a homage to Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston acknowledging their great success as not writers, but as a community