LAURA MCCULLOUGH
  • About
  • Bio
  • Services
  • Books
  • News/blog

Lip Service to the Master?

2/23/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Hadara Bar-Nadav closely examines “The Radical Nature of Helene Johnson’s This Waiting for Love and asks us to consider the women poets of the Harlem Renaissance:

Critics tend to focus on Johnson’s more obvious breaks from conventions in which she uses urban vernacular language; however, it is in her pastoral poems that she is most radical, articulating a bold aesthetic vision while paying poetic lip-service to the master. In Johnson’s pastoral poetry, she constructs a revisionist model of poetics that envisions creative support among women; alternatives to the power dynamics of the traditional artist-muse relationship; alliances between women and nature, and women and poetry; and nature as a key subject through which subversive messages can be coded and accessed by others. 

Among Johnson’s contributions to literature of the Harlem Renaissance is her use of nature as a means to revise conventional models of creativity. The poem “Magula” begins: “Oh Magula, come! Take my hand and I’ll read you poetry, / Chromatic words, / Seraphic symphonies...” (Johnson 2000, 34). This invitation from the speaker to Magula suggests that the creative interaction between these two women will result in a heavenly, musical language.

FOR THE FULL ESSAY AND ALL THE OTHERS, GET THE ANTHOLOGY HERE:

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Writing,  Making Music, Working with people, & Loving &  Living in New Jersey

    Archives

    July 2021
    February 2021
    December 2019
    December 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    September 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    August 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013

    Categories

    All
    A Sense Of Regard
    Claudia Rankine
    Laura McCullough
    Leslie McGrath
    Poetry
    Race
    R. Dwayne Betts
    Tony Hoagland
    University Of Georgia Press

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • About
  • Bio
  • Services
  • Books
  • News/blog