Reading a Poem by
Rudolph Lewis at Winter Solstice
Good readings are sometimes governed by iconoclasm, the
smashing of established gestures of decoding.
A reader just walks out of the prison built by guardians of culture; she
or he discards mindcuffs and explores; he or she discovers the wilderness is
more intellectual than the glacial chambers in palaces of wisdom, the prisons
of correctness. Despite probable errors
of misreading, the reader’s sense of being independent is rewarding.
When I first read the typescript of Rudolph Lewis’s Mockingbirds at Jerusalem, I felt that I
was discovering traces of unbridled creativity.
The most important features of his craft and craftsmanship were derived
from paying more attention to life rhythms than to treatises on prosody and
monographs on how to write a poem. The
bane of much contemporary poetry is disingenuous professionalism. What does it
profit a poet to achieve technical brilliance without fire? Lewis has mastered fire and artistry.
After reading the published version of Mockingbirds at Jerusalem (Pikesville,
MD: Black Academy Press, 2014), I have rediscovered “Defying Raging Night,” one
of several touchstones in the book.
Lewis has the discipline needed to write such fresh, engaging villanelles
as “The Thrill Is Gone: A Blues Villanelle” and “Get Up Dead Man: Blues
Villanelle #2.” I am attracted more,
however, his playing a riff on the formality of the villanelle by invoking the
blues in “Defying Raging Night.” The
poem is a defiant tribute to Dylan Thomas’s masterpiece “Do Not Go Gentle Into
That Good Night,” a tribute that confirms the rightness of Thomas’s general imperatives
to resist the inevitable by displacing them with specific, burning recognitions
from African American blues ethos.
Thomas inspires. Lewis empowers.
Lewis demonstrates that fixed poetic structures can be unfixed to one’s
advantage.
Lewis’s achievement in this poem depends on cultural
literacy, a reader’s ability to grasp allusions: “in ancient cypress swamps”
---James Weldon Johnson; “ringing insect sounds affirmed” ---Richard Wright; “I’ve
known black wonders”---Langston Hughes. Place names evoke knowledge of African
geography and scenes of ethnic language creation as well as genocide—Bukavu, Lake
Kivu, Goma, Grand Marché, and Kongo. A genuine reading of “Defying Raging Night”
absorbs a reader, uniting her or him with the lyric persona as a Middle Passage
survivor who can know “black wonder soothing enough to/write letters in hope of
a Mockingbird spring.”
The poems in Mockingbirds
at Jerusalem are aesthetic tools for building something positive and as yet
unknown during winter in America.
Read. Use the tools Rudolph Lewis
has given us to increase our collective ability to resist ignorant armies that
clash in raging night. Read. Build
critical independence.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. December
21, 2014
