The Poetry of Young by Al Young
Al Young's poetry is a richly layered exploration of personal and collective experiences, set against the backdrop of social and political upheaval. As a poet, Young employs introspection to delve into themes of identity, community, and the African American experience, often reflecting on his own life journey from Mississippi to urban centers like Detroit. His work is distinguished by a lyrical style that draws heavily from jazz influences, embodying a musicality that enhances the emotional depth of his writing. Young's poetry transcends mere social commentary; it grapples with the complexities of race, love, and the human spirit through a deeply personal lens.
Throughout his career, Young has garnered numerous accolades, including fellowships and awards, affirming his status as a significant voice in contemporary literature. He has also served as California's poet laureate, furthering his mission to highlight the importance of arts and culture in society. His collections reflect a blend of narrative and lyrical forms, capturing moments of joy and sorrow while advocating for a more profound understanding of humanity. Overall, Al Young's poetry invites readers to engage with the world through a lens of compassion, creativity, and resilience.
The Poetry of Young by Al Young
First published:Dancing, 1969; The Song Turning Back into Itself, 1971; Geography of the Near Past, 1976; The Blues Don’t Change: New and Selected Poems, 1982; Heaven: Collected Poems, 1956-1990, 1992; Straight No Chaser, 1994; Conjugal Visits, and Other Poems in Verse and Prose, 1996; The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990-2000, 2001; Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems, 2001-2006, 2006; Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry, 2007
Type of work: Poetry
Introspection as Social Commentary
Al Young’s distinctive and finely wrought poetry documents the personal odyssey of a clear-sighted and sensitive man in a period of social and political turmoil. Young’s poetry seldom takes the form of an overt political manifesto or social commentary. He is a practitioner of a time-honored tradition of lyric poetry that comments on the larger issues of society by a close introspection of everyday life and private emotions.
Young’s writing has earned him numerous awards, including a Wallace E. Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two American Book Awards, the PEN-USA Award for Nonfiction, and a Fulbright Fellowship that enabled him to travel and work in Eastern Europe. He has taught at several institutions, including Rice University, Stanford University, Davidson College, and the University of California’s campuses at Santa Cruz and at Berkeley. In 2005, he was appointed California’s poet laureate. Three years later, he received the Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement in literature. In addition to poetry, Young is also the author of several highly acclaimed novels, a trilogy of innovative “musical memoirs,” and screenplays for such Hollywood films as Sparkle (1976) and Uptown Saturday Night (1974). It was poetry, however, that first brought him to attention as an important voice in contemporary American letters.
The son of Albert and Mary Campbell Young, poet Albert James Young was born in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, on May 31, 1939. His father, a professional jazz musician during the 1930’s, became an autoworker when he moved the family to Detroit, Michigan, in 1946. During his youth, Young spent summers in rural Mississippi but attended public schools in Detroit, graduating from Central High School. Young attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of California at Berkeley while also pursuing a professional career as a jazz flutist, singer, and guitarist in the folk-music style popular on college campuses in the early 1960’s. He received a B.A. from the University of California in 1969 and published his first collection of poems, Dancing, that same year.
A Poet’s Coming of Age
“The coming of age of America’s black artists continues to be a subject that’s rarely touched upon,” Young has written. In his own case, he was from his early years a voracious reader and avid listener to all types of music, and his early poetry shows the influence of these wide-ranging interests. Jazz music made a lasting impact. In the late 1950’s, he attended concerts at Detroit’s New Music Society that featured local musicians such as Yusef Lateef, Charles McPherson, Donald Byrd, Kenny Burrell, Pepper Adams, and others who would later achieve international reputations. Young was impressed both by the respect these musicians enjoyed in the community and by the seriousness with which they approached their art. Jazz at that period was not viewed merely as entertainment. In Bodies and Soul: Musical Memoirs (1981), Young recalled that
any jazz worthy of the name was expected to be about something. The main idea was still to venture out there and play what you had to say meaningfully, with as much feeling and personal inventiveness as you needed to get your story across to those with whom you were communing. It was a two-way avenue of expression along which player and hearer drove and refueled one another and yet, at heart, were one.
As he made the transition in the late 1960’s from playing music professionally to writing poetry, Young adapted the ideal of jazz performance to literary composition. The interest in jazz from his teenage years was blended with experiences of Negro spirituals and tales learned from his grandmother Lillian Campbell in the small hamlet of Pachuta, Mississippi. He later wrote of her, “She is as Southern as meat brown pecans,/ or fried green tomato, or moon pies.” It is this African American heritage, both rural and urban, that Young’s poems record and examine. Like poet Michael S. Harper, Young focuses on the personal testimony that is inherent in jazz playing and in the African American religious tradition as the most authentic element of his aesthetic approach. Young’s work, as he states in “Poetry,” is based on his own personal experience but reflects the universal “longing to have known everything/ & to have been everywhere/ before the world dissolves.”
A poem such as “Myself When I Am Real,” written in 1967, demonstrates Young’s handling of his diverse sources. The title is taken from a recording by jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus. The poet intends the work partly as a tribute to the musician and partly as an impressionistic report of the mood inspired by Mingus’s music. Music is never actually mentioned in the poem, which begins with a paraphrase of a traditional blues verse: “The sun is shining in my backdoor/ right now.” The poet then expresses, in lines reminiscent of the metaphors of the Persian poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, a mystic of the Islamic Sufi tradition and founder of an order of dervishes whose dance meditations are performed to the text of his poems, a feeling of losing his individual personality and “melting” in the penetrating sunlight that seems to represent a spiritual reality:
Love of life is love of God
This sudden awareness leads to a reintegration of the individual self with both God and nature:
He who loves me
The symmetry of this poem is accomplished in the final lines, which return to the opening blues motif and create a meaningful variation: “I long to fade back/ into this door of sun forever.” These lines show a skillful and sophisticated poet at work, one able to simultaneously project the cosmic humanism of Walt Whitman, the life-affirming sensibility of Negro spirituals and the blues, and a convincing adaptation of classical Islamic poetic conventions.
Searching for the Human Spirit
Young’s unexpectedly logical metaphor of “melting” in sunlight in “Myself When I Am Real” is taken literally in a spiritual sense and followed by the even more unexpected metaphor of “fading” into the bright sunlight that becomes surrealistically synonymous with a door that serves as an entrance to the infinity of the universe. Although Young’s later poems do not reveal their literary influences as immediately as does “Myself When I Am Real,” all of his work is grounded in a thorough knowledge and recall of a wide spectrum of classical and contemporary literature, philosophy, and folklore. Young’s use of such sources, however, is not academic or pedantic. “As a kid,” he has written, “I got the idea that still persists with me, that when we look at any painting or piece of writing or listen to any piece of music, what we are actually doing is searching for the human spirit.”
Each of Young’s collections of poems demonstrates his firm commitment to such a humanistic aesthetic. Dancing contains twenty-seven poems, most of which deal explicitly with the theme or metaphor of the dance. The opening poem of the sequence, “A Dance for Militant Dilettantes,” positions Young in opposition to the so-called revolutionary black poets who achieved popularity during the 1960’s. Using satire, Young presents a poem intended to offer “advice to young poets”:
You got to learn to put in about
Such a poetry of unsavory detail, a parody of Amiri Baraka’s well-known poem “Black Art,” will bring its author popularity because readers of black poetry “don’t want no bourgeois woogie/ they want them a militant nigger/ in a fiji haircut.”
Although Young clearly is opposed to irresponsible rabble-rousing presented in the guise of poetry, he does not himself avoid confronting and protesting what racism has done to African American people. In “A Dance for Ma Rainey,” he declares that he will create a song in honor of the great blues singer that will embody the “redblooded american agony . . . that bred/ & battered us all.” He intends the poem to reverse the detrimental affects of racism by depicting
our beautiful brave black people
Young’s collaged images of music and social dislocation, of the needles that play phonograph records and the needles used by drug addicts, force readers to consider whether the sorrow and desperation that is often the subject matter of the blues singer is really equivalent to the antisocial and self-destructive behavior caused by racism’s attempt to deny that African Americans are beautiful, brave, or entitled to the same respect and opportunities enjoyed by others.
Similarly, in “Dancing in the Street,” the poet announces his desire to “bring back a more golden picture of us . . . healthy black masters/ of our own destiny.” Other poems carefully present the tragic alternatives to such a positive self-image. In “2 Tales from Love in Los Angeles,” Young contrasts portraits of a penurious old man barely surviving in his rented room and a reckless young black man distracted by the so-called prizes of American society. The young man’s expensive imported sports car, white female companion, and chemical hairstyle are emblems of prodigality that clearly rate the old man’s (and the poet’s) disapproval. Young makes his point without strident rhetoric.
Young’s poetic themes often reflect quiet introspection, love for women, concern for friends, and impressions recorded while traveling in cities in many different countries. “Paris” embraces several of these themes. The poet notes his foreignness even though he is excited by the fabled glamour of the city. His ruminations soon turn to politics and personal memories. Soberly, he notes:
this is France
Paris is also the adopted home of Richard Wright, the African American novelist who moved there to escape American racial inequities only to discover that European imperialism produced similar problems. Young’s own childhood memories of Mississippi are the subject of many poems and elicit both nostalgia and bitterness. He recalls, in “A Little More Travelling Music,” the poverty of his youthful surroundings and the way that people found a way to help one another. He speaks of his mother, who “had a knack for snapping juicy fruit gum/ & for keeping track of the generations of chilrens/ she had raised, reared & no doubt forwarded.” Depicting himself as one of those Southern children sent north to get a better education and avoid the hard life of farm labor, the speaker of the poem studies hard in Detroit, goes to college, and becomes conversant with the world of books and ideas. He is never able, however, to “forget all that motherly music.”
A Continuing Struggle for Identity
The Song Turning Back into Itself (1971) includes further reminiscences of Mississippi and the poet’s struggle to realize his own identity. The play on words in the book’s title prefigures the ambiguities of race and class that are the subject of several poems. “The Problem of Identity,” a prose poem, presents early male role models including the persona’s father, the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis (a native of Alabama who also migrated to Detroit), and a family friend named Otis who had a talent for drawing but “went up to Chicago, sadness, madness, wed, bled, dope, hopelessness, catapulted into the 20th century.” Many of the poems that follow recount a personal struggle to avoid the fate that befalls Otis. “Sunday Illumination” celebrates the joy of small pleasures such as hiking in the Berkeley, California, hills. The physical exertion and the beauty of both the natural landscape and the suburban skyline in the distance bring the poet a restorative vision that he feels is similar to the Buddhist concept of satori, or enlightenment. Appropriately, the poem is written in the verse paragraph form used by William Blake and Walt Whitman, both of whom recorded similar messages about the human being’s relationship to both the natural and the constructed environment.
Young, however, is not a poet much attracted to landscapes; his primary concern is with other people. In “I Arrive in Madrid,” he notes that “the wretched of the earth/ are my brothers.” He is immediately aware that this perception is not much more than a facile political slogan that rings as hollow as the travel agent’s or the government’s “publicity” that gives Madrid, and other cities, false faces that actually mask their human realities.
Seeking the insight to penetrate such misleading superficiality remains the poet’s goal in Geography of the Near Past (1976), which is notable for a series of satirical poems titled “Boogie with O. O. Gabugah,” purporting to be the works of a stereotypical “street poet.” Young’s parody of militant “rappers” is pointedly funny and can be read as a restatement of the early “A Dance for Militant Dilettantes.” Other poems in this collection present a darker mood. Works such as “Herrick Hospital, Fifth Floor,” “Visiting Day,” “Roland Navarro (1939-1961),” “Ho,” and “Some Recent Fiction” attempt to count the losses and map some understanding of how racism, drugs, cynicism, and violence are destroying America’s youth. These poems, however, are balanced by lyrics about the birth of the poet’s son and buoyant memoirs such as “New Orleans Intermission.” Here, an encounter on the St. Charles Street trolley causes Young to question the very necessity of poetry:
an old American, classically black,
Young’s poems are more than mere snapshots; they are also his way of highlighting “what’s keepable” from his travels and personal interactions.
Young’s employment of subtle visual imagery, in a manner that suggests the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, is evident in lines such as “Old emotions like powdery tenements/ undulate in the July heat” from the poem “City Home/Detroit.” In such works, as in those that almost imperceptibly radiate the wisdom in vernacular African American speech, Young focuses his own and his readers’ attention and goes about the crucial business of “refining your eyesight, opening your ears/ for a liberating music.”
The twenty-six poems in The Blues Don’t Change: New and Selected Poems (1982) offer treatment of familiar themes such as the creative impulse represented by jazz, meditations on nature, and the nature of friendship. Tight in structure (often only nine or twelve lines), written in a simple but elegant vernacular diction, these are the work of a mature poet who has mastered all elements of his craft. All of Young’s poetry—brilliant in perception, subtle in its understated eloquence, always reaching toward spiritual insight—represents the tradition of “testifying” that can be found both in the aesthetic of jazz performance and in the Southern church that is the matrix of much African American art and folklore.
A Broadening of Form
In contrast to the spare simplicity of The Blues Don’t Change, Young’s work in the 1990’s and early twenty-first century includes a broad range of poetic forms, from representations of jazz riffs to the Shakespearean sonnet. In The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990-2000 (2001) and Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry (2007), Young’s free, flexible use of strict form bears out his comment to a reporter that “I’ve got the chops now to do whatever I wish.”
Many recent poems further develop subjects familiar from Young’s earlier work. For example, in “I Can’t Get Started” (titled after Ira Gershwin’s popular song), Young returns to the theme of unfulfilled longing despite the trappings of success. His paraphrase of Gershwin’s lyrics exemplifies what African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois called “double consciousness,” or “warring ideals” that divide personal identity into two or more facets. The speaker of the poem concludes with these lines:
In my bourgeois house, by my brand new pool,
Thus, personal testimony can bring an ironic twist to the lyrics that inspire a poem. The lines suggest that, like some members of white society, some African Americans may have everything materially, but not what they truly long for—perhaps a particular beloved person, or perhaps the speaker’s own soul. As always, Young makes his point gently, without bombast.
A Wider Audience
The appointment of Young—a longtime educator as well as a poet—as California’s poet laureate in 2005 further empowered him to call public attention to the importance of culture and the arts, which he calls essential to democracy. His poem “Sundays in Democracies” takes three points of view—Democrat, Republican, and Citizen—and finds the first two unsatisfactory. The “Citizen” declares, “More parties, please . . .” and predicts the disaster that would follow from relinquishing “frequencies”—the right of free expression:
If you think oil is over-priced,
As he has aged, Young has introduced a new theme, that of mortality, in his work. “Dead Moth Blues,” a sonnet, concludes with an uncharacteristically gloomy line: “they all go missing. Caterpillars. Moths,” reminding readers that life can be summarily cut off, early or late. More typically, however, the poet celebrates pure faith without any need for justification, as in the poem simply titled “Faith”:
. . . Faith trusts
“The Art of Benny Carter” is a further expression of how “what is timed” bolsters faith in what is most beautiful in life, and beyond life:
There are afternoons in jazz
“Sadness is the theme of existence,” Young wrote in the poem “Detroit 1958,” “joy its variations.” What must not be missed, however, is that his poems do not dwell on painful moments; like a true jazz improviser, Young is more concerned with spinning out ever more marvelous and inventive variations. “Let us laugh/ each at the other/ & be friends,” he sings. Assembled from the diverse impressions, observations, and reminiscences of his world, Young’s variations and the message of his poetry simply remind readers that their business is to create more joy. As he declares in his “Statement on Poetics” in The Sound of Dreams Remembered, “Music—with which poetry remains eternally intimate—seems a dead ringer, as it were, for life. . . . What is life but spirit; spirit-thought made hearable, seeable, smellable, touchable, and delectable?”
Bibliography
Broughton, Irv, ed. The Writer’s Mind: Interviews with American Authors. Vol. 3. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990. Contains an overview of Young’s literary career.
Davis, Francis. “O. O. Gabugah Interviews Himself.” The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1988, p. 10. Davis, a writer on jazz, discusses the role of music as a source of poetic inspiration for Young.
Johnson, Charles. “The Men.” In Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Commentary on Young by a celebrated novelist, who notes that Young “is distinguished by the emphasis in his large body of work on a gentle vision of black American life that is, at bottom, harmonious and spiritual.”
O’Brien, John, ed. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. Includes a concise but important interview focusing on Young’s early poems and the novel Snakes.
Young, Al. “A Conversation With Al Young.” Interview by Bruce Allen Dick. Cold Mountain Review, Fall, 2003. Young shares his ideas on poetic composition and his belief in “another aspect of you that’s beyond the body, beyond what you think of as yourself.”
Young, Al. Interview by Heidi Benson. San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 2008, p. M-4. Excellent exposition of Young’s view that language is instrumental in shaping human consciousness and that clear language is an antidote to the political chicanery he abhors.
Young, Al. “Interview with Al Young.” Interview by Nathaniel Mackey. MELUS 5 (Winter, 1978): 32-51. Detailed and useful interview covering Young’s work as poet, novelist, and Hollywood screenwriter.