Introduction for Cinders
Rekindled
ANGER OF REDEMPTION
Between
Charlie Braxton’s first book of poems, Ascension from the Ashes (1990), and Cinders Rekindled, his second
collection, is a lake of incineration, the space wherein the risen phoenix
transforms cinders into embers and embers into flames of black fire (circa
1968) in order to burn the anger of redemption into American consciousness
grown lazy and blind under the influence of “progress” or supersubtle fictions
of social and political change. Those
familiar with his earlier work, including his poems anthologized in In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young
Black Writers (1992), Bum Rush the
Page (2001) and Role Call: A
Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (2002)
will note a shift from the lyric mode of “Bluesman” and the blues ethos of “We
Can’t Afford to Die” to a relentless riffing on the anger of feeling and the
feeling of anger. Indeed, the poems in Cinders Rekindled are eruptive/disruptive proofs for the final lines of
Braxton’s poem “The Arts Are Black” ---
the bombs & bullets
hurled
from the suffering soul
of a real black artist
What is of special
importance is Braxton’s refusal to discard the vocabulary and poetics
associated with the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement either for the rhymes,
inventions, and rhythms of spoken word or for the delicacies of craft and
sensibility that are in stark contrast to the class-marked utterances of the
neo-hip hop generation of poets. For he reminds us that we often have game in
talking about suffering but we only rarely want to hear the sound of
suffering. His refusal, however, is not
a signal of his being enslaved by the past but rather a sign that fidelity to
poetry as polemic or political challenge remains a vibrant option. Given Braxton’s transformations of allusions
to old-time black religion into the militant anger of the unfinished
revolutions in American human rights and human relations, one may tentatively
conclude that he has bravely risked the aesthetics of the abrasive. The
cumulative impact of Braxton’s poetry may be an ironic transformation of
readers into stalwart witnesses of the chaos that is now as it serves as a foil
for continuing efforts to wring the sublime and the beautiful out of the
vernacular.
As a poet, Braxton
defies the premature comfort that may accompany change; his is the fierce
preservation of traditions of the near past, an affirmation that genuine poetry
involves tracing of a people’s diverse states of being and thought. Braxton’s
work is an affirmation that the prophecy that lends power to the jeremiad burns
productively in “the suffering soul/of a real black artist.” Do not ask what is real. Feel what is audacious in the flames of anger
as redemption.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 10, 2011
P. S. (January 20, 2014) Cinders Rekindled can be purchased at
Lulu.com: http://www.lulu.com/us/en/shop/charlie-r-braxton/cinders-rekindled/paperbook/ptofuvy-20299325.html Amiri
Baraka wrote in “What’s New: Charlie Braxton” (12/18/88), his introduction for
Ascension from the Ashes: “What we artist need to be pulling together is a
Cultural Revolution. Charlie’s in tune, like the kids say (and we used to) He
know what time it is!” Baraka blessed
Braxton, and now is the time to read or reread Braxton’s music.
