Tag: modernist poetry

Richard Bruce Nugent: “…And the Echo of Their Steps Mingled”

Photographers Unknown, And the Echo of Their Steps Mingled

…Alex walked and the click of his heels sounded…and had an echo…sound being tossed back and forth…back and forth…someone was approaching…and their echoes mingled…and gave the sound of castanets…Alex like the sound of the approaching man’s footsteps…he walked music also…he knew the beauty of the narrow blue…Alex knew that by the way their echoes mingled…he wished he would speak… but strangers don’t speak at four o’clock in the morning…at least if they did he couldn’t imagine what would be said…maybe pardon me but are you walking toward the stars…yes, sir, and if you walk long enough…then may I walk with you I want to reach the stars too…perdone me señor tiene usted fósforo…Alex was glad he had been addressed in Spanish…to have been asked for a match in English…or to have been addressed in English at all…would have been blasphemy just then…Alex handed him a match…he glanced at his companion apprehensively in the match glow…he was afraid that his appearance would shatter the blur thoughts…and stars…ah…his face was a perfect compliment to his voice…and the echo of their steps mingled…they walked in silence…the castanets of their heels clicking accompaniment… the strangler inhaled deeply and with a nod of content and a smile…blew a cloud of smoke…Alex felt like singing…the stranger knew the magic of blue smoke also…they continued in silence…the castanets of their heels clicking rhythmically…Alex turned in his doorway…up the stairs and the stranger waited for him to light the room…no need for words…they had always known each other……

Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”,  Excerpt, November 1926, Originally published in “Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists”, Editor-in-Chief: Wallace Thurman

Born in Washington, D.C. in July of 1906, Richard Bruce Nugent was a prominent Black American modernist poet, writer, and painter of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural and intellectual movement of African-American arts, politics, and literature that was centered in the Harlem area of New York City through the 1920s and 1930s.

One of two sons born into the influential family of Richard Henry Nugent, Jr. and Pauline Minerva Bruce, Richard Bruce Nugent was exposed to a rich cultural environment that included theater performances by the Lafayette Players and his father’s extensive library. His early friendship with the young Angelina Weld Grimké, later the celebrated Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright, encouraged his development as a writer.

Bruce Nugent relocated at the age of thirteen with his mother and brother Gary to New York City after his father’s death from tuberculosis in 1920. Interested in the avant-garde culture of Greenwich Village, he started taking art classes. In the hope that he  would find reliable employment, Nugent’s mother sent him to live with his maternal grandmother in Washington D.C. He worked at several common jobs, often using the name Ricardo Nugen di Dosocta to earn higher wages. It was during this time that he became friends with writers Langston Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson, with whom he often collaborated on literary works.

Intrigued in 1925 by the growing Harlem Renaissance movement, Richard Bruce Nugent followed Langston Hughes back to New York City. His first works as a writer, the poem “Shadow” and short story “Sahdji” were published in that year. An African morality tale that condemned murder, the short story was rewritten by Nugent as the theatrical “Sahdji: An African Ballet” and later produced in the summer of 1932 at Rochester, New York’s Eastman School of Music. During the short period between 1926 and 1928 in which he lived with novelist Wallace Thurman, Nugent published “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” in the 1926 literary magazine “Fire!!”. The short story was written in a modernist stream-of-consciousness style and dealt with bisexuality and interracial male desire.

Bruce Nugent’s illustrations were featured in “Fire” and other publications of the period; four of his paintings were included in the 1931 William E. Harmon Foundation’s exhibition of Afro-American and Afro-diasporic artists. Between 1928 and 1933, Nugent wrote “Gentleman Jigger”, a semi-autobiographical satirical novel about a defiantly queer Black artist who moved to Harlem and then Greenwich Village. This novel was published posthumously by Da Capo Press in 2008.

Richard Bruce Nugent worked in the 1930s depression era as a writer of biographical sketches for the Federal Writers’ Project of the New Deal program’s Works Progress Administration. In 1945, he published “Beyond Where the Stars Stood Still”. This unique rare-edition work, fully illustrated by Nugent, centered on interracial male desire, bisexuality, queer identity, and homoerotic expression. “Beyond Where the Stars Stood Still” is now considered a foundational work of early Black queer literature as it pushed the boundaries of the deeply coded or hidden homosexual themes of the time.

In 1964, Bruce Nugent attended Columbia University’s Community Planning Conference, a collaboration with the Manhattan’s Community Planning Board 10. This workshop led to Nugent and other members to form the Harlem Cultural Council to promote Harlem artists and seek funds for both the arts and the construction of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In addition to his position as the counsel’s co-chairman, Nugent served as chair of the Program Committee and worked as artist, commentator and performer.

A man known for his writing and illustrations, Richard Bruce Nugent also spent many years as a dancer. In the 1930s, he appeared in many shows including American composer and arranger of African-American spiritual music Francis Hall Johnson’s folk opera “Run, Little Chillun”. It was one of the most successful musical dramas of the Harlem Renaissance and the first Broadway show directed by an African-American. Nugent toured for two years in a production of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s “Porgy: A Play in Four Acts” and danced with several companies including noted dancer Hemsley Winfield’s New Negro Art Theater Dance Group.

As the author of over twenty published works and one of the last survivors of the Harlem Renaissance, Bruce Nugent was consulted by numerous writers and biographers on both Black and gay history. He was interviewed for the 1984 “Before Stonewall” documentary and his work was featured in British filmmaker and Professor of the Arts Sir Isaac Julien’s 1989 documentary “Looking for Langston”. One of the few Harlem artists in the Harlem Renaissance that were publicly out as gay, Richard Bruce Nugent passed away at the age of eighty on the twenty-seventh of May in 1987 of congestive heart failure in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Notes: Established in 1926, the historic Harlem Renaissance literary magazine, “Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists”, was independently published and entirely self-funded by its own editors. It did not have an established institutional or commercial publisher. Originally conceived as a quarterly journal, only one issue was ever published due to poor sales and an apartment fire that destroyed what remained of their inventory of five hundred copies.

“Fire!!” was produced by a collective of young African American artists and writers. Novelist Wallace Thurman served as the editor-in-chief, while the principal founding board and primary financial backers included Langston Hughes, John P. Davis, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Gwendolyn Bennett.

The complete work of Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” can be found at Amardeep Singh’s ”African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology” located at: https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/bruce-nugent-smoke-lilies-and-jade-1926?path=richard-bruce-nugent-1906-1987-author-page

The Center for New Performances (CNP) has an article on the theatrical version of “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” at: https://centerfornewperformance.org/projects/smoke-lillies-and-jade/

The Modernist Review has a 2020 article by writer and performer Dylan Brown entitled “Cruising the Harlem Renaissance with Richard Bruce Nugent” at: https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2020/11/09/cruising-the-harlem-renaissance-with-richard-bruce-nugent/

Top Insert Image: Carl Vam Vechten, “Richard Bruce Nugent”, February 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, National Portrait Gallery

Second Insert Image: Richard Bruce Nugent, “Drawing for Mulattoes, Number 2”, 1927, Illustration for “Ebony and Topaz-A Collectanea”, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University

Third Insert Image: Carl Vam Vechten, “Richard Bruce Nugent”, February 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, National Portrait Gallery

Fourth Insert Image: Richard Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”, 1925, Mixed Media on Paper, Howard University Gallery of Art

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Richard Bruce Nugent”, 1982, Gelatin Silver Print

Robert Duncan: “It Was the Sound of Fire on the Hearth”

Photographers Unknown, Food for Fire, Food for Thought

good wood
that all fiery youth bust forth from winter,
go to sleep in the poem.
Who will remember thy green flame,
thy dream’s amber?

Language obeyd flares tongues in obscure matter.

We trace faces in clouds: they drift apart.
Palaces of air. The sun dying down
sets them on fire.

Descry shadows on the flood from its dazzling mood,
or at its shore read runes upon the sand
from sea-spume.

This is what I wanted for the last poem.
A loosening of conventions and return to open form.

Leonardo saw figures that were stains upon a wall
Let the apparitions containd in the ground
play as they will.

You have carried a branch of tomorrow into the room.
Its frangrance had awakend me. No. .

It was the sound of a fire on the hearth
Leapd up where you bankd it
. . .sparks of delight. Now I return the thought

to the red glow, that might-be-magical blood,
palaces of heat in the fire’s mouth,

If you look you will see the salamander–

to the very elements that attend us,
fairies of the fire, the radiant crawling. .

That was a long time ago.
No. They were never really there,

though once I saw–did I stare
into the hear of desire burning
and see a radiant man? like those
fancy cities from fire into fire falling.

We are close enough to childhood, so easily purged
of whatever we thought we were to be.

Flamey threads of firstness go out from your touch,

flickers of unlikely heat
at the edge of our belief bud forth.

Robert Duncan, “Food for Fire, Food for Thought”, October 1959, Poetry, Volume 95 Number 1

Born at Oakland, California in January of 1919, Robert Edward Duncan was an American poet and a follower of Hilda Doolittle, a modernist poet who, with Ezra Pound, co-founded the Imagist group of poets. Duncan featured prominently in the histories of pre-Stonewall gay culture, bohemian communities of the Beat Generation, and cultural movements of the 1960s.

Born the tenth child of Edward Howard Duncan and Marguerite Pearl Wesley, Robert Duncan was adopted after the death of his mother by Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes. The prominent architect and his wife were a Theosophist family who embraced the spiritual teachings of Western esotericism as founded by Russian-American mystic and writer Helena Blavatsky. Robert Duncan grew up in a stable environment with new parents interested in both the occult and social community projects.

Encouraged by an English high school teacher, Duncan chose poetry as a vocation while still in his teens. After the death of Edwin Symmes in 1936, he began his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. While in his sophomore year, Duncan met graduate student Neo Fahs and entered into his first recorded homosexual relationship that lasted until 1940. While living in New York City with Fahs, he met many literary figures including playwright Arthur Miller and French-born essayist and writer Anaïs Nin.

During 1938, Robert Duncan briefly attended North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, an experimental educational project that became known for its artists and post-modernist poets. When he was drafted for military service in 1941, Duncan declared his homosexuality and was discharged. He became a prominent figure in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture with his 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society” published in editor and publisher Dwight Macdonald’s “Politics”, an outspoken magazine with articles by such notables as George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, and Mary McCarthy.

Duncan relocated to San Francisco in 1945 where he became friends with poets Helen Adam and Kenneth Rexroth as well as painter Lyn Brockway. He returned to U.C. Berkeley where he studied Medieval and Renaissance literature, eventually becoming a shamanistic figure in the artistic and poetry circles of San Francisco. Duncan’s first book, “Heavenly City Earthly City”, a collection of verse that reflected his admiration for the metaphysical work of British poet George Barker, was published by writer and physicist Bernard Porter’s newly founded Ben Porter Books in 1947.

In 1950, Robert Duncan met painter and collagist Jess Collins and began a relationship that would last thirty-seven years until Duncan’s death. They took marriage vows and settled in a historic Victorian home in San Francisco’s Mission District. Duncan began to publish his work regularly in the early 1950s and taught at Black Mountain College during 1956. His artistic and critical success occurred in the 1960s with the publishing of three volumes of poetic work: “Opening the Field” in 1960, the 1964 “Roots and Branches”, and “Bending the Bow” in 1968.

After the publication of his “Bending the Bow”, Duncan vowed not to publish another major collection for fifteen years. In 1984, his next major work “Ground Work I: Before the War” won the National Poetry Award. The concluding volume of Duncan’s poems, “Ground Work II: In the Dark”, taken as a whole was proposed by him in 1968 and later published in 1987.

Robert Duncan’s poetry is one of process not conclusion. It is considered Modernist for his inclination towards the impersonal, mythic and canonical styles; however, it is also seen as Romantic due to its organic, lyric and forward-wandering journey. Beginning in the 1960s, Duncan’s work was influenced by both  “projective verse”, poetry that is shaped by the rhythms of the poet’s breath, and “composition by field”, the use of the page as a field of language beyond traditional margins and spacing. His work includes short lyrical poems and recurring sequences of prose poems, both of which draw inspiration from the poetic work of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and particularly that of modernist Charles John Olson and the Black Mountain School of poetry.

One of the most influential of the postwar American poets, Robert Duncan died in San Francisco in 1988 after a long battle with kidney disease. He was survived by his partner Jess Collins who died in January of 2004 at the age of eighty. Duncan’s papers are housed at the State University of New York-Buffalo and the Special Collections and Archives of Kent State University.

“There is a natural mystery in poetry. We do not understand all that we render up to understanding. . . I study what I write as I study out any mystery. I work at language as a spring of water works at the rock, to find a course, and so, blindly. In this I am not a maker of things, but, if maker, a maker of a way. For the way is itself.”—Robert Duncan, Notebook published in Donald Allen’s “The New American Poetry: 1945-1960”, First Edition, 1960, Grove Press, New York

Notes: The Archives of American Art has an online copy available for public viewing of Robert Duncan and Jess Collins’s scrapbook for Patricia Jordan at: https://www.aaa.si.edu/uv/index.html?manifest=https://www.aaa.si.edu/manifest/edanmdm:AAADCD_item_11139&c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&config=uv-config.json&locales=en-GB:English%20(GB)

Second Insert Image: Original Cover for Robert Duncan’s “Roots and Branches”, 1964, New Directions Publishing, New York

Third Insert Image: Jess Collins, Original Collage Illustration for Robert Duncan’s “The Opening of the Field”, 1960, Private Collection 

Fourth Insert Image: Robert Duncan, “Bending the Bow”, 1968, 1st Edition, Publisher New Directions, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Jonathan Williams, “Robert Duncan”, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library