Letter to Douglas Watson December 1981 (page 2 of 3)

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For Dr. Douglas Watson, answers to questions in letter of 3 Dec. 1981 concerning essay to appear in The Dictionary of Literary Biography. 1. What forces shaped my poetic work? Regarding initial inspiration, I was influenced as a child by my mother's gathering ug seven chil- dren around her at rather regular intervals to read from the Bible, from fiction in the Saturday Evening Post, etc. The beauty of the Biblical language and the dramatic interest of the stories combined with my reading books from the local (Alliance, Nebr.) library--I read practically all of the western and adventure and sports novels-- to give me the ambition to write. As a boy I wrote poems, and as a teenager in Kansas and Iowa I wrote many short stories, mostly de- tective or mystery stories (all burned as inadequate work). Encouraged at Howard University after World War II service, I wrote several poems published in college anthologies and campus news- papers. Also at Howard, Pearl Buck, upon visiting the campus, encour- aged my fiction writing by praising the first two chapters of a novel that I wrote as a freshman and sophomore (a novel which I never un- wrapped upon its return from Little, Brown, and Company, the second refusal following a rejection by Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy (spelling? who had asked me, however, to be sure to submit my second novel--which I never began). At Northwestern University in Evanston, a teacher encouraged my fiction writing upon seeing my novel (the portrait of the mother in which he found unforgettable); and two of my poems were published in a campus journal. At Northwestern I wrote my first seri- ous poem, "Sonnet for a Writer," and was encouraged when Professor Zera S. Fink read it to my classmates in a Wordsworth seminar, saying "Mr. Emanuel is a poet." The poem won a "Citation for Merit" from Flame Magazine later (the result of its poll of poetry editors), after its 1958 publication in Phylon. Near the end of the 1950's I began to write poetry as steadily as I could find time, and have done so since then. The New York Times encouraged me very much (Thomas Lask was the Poetry Editor) by publishing a number of my early poems; so did Phylon and a number of the poems printed by these two periodicals have been often reprinted and remain popular. Negro Digest / Black World also encouraged me similarly. About 1970 I stopped submitting poetry to journals, intending only to bring out volumes. As for the influence of other poets, my earliest models were na- turally the poets that I read in college and university, traditional writers. I first admired the English masters like Keats, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and others. Perhaps my first conscious influence was Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his conciseness and vividness and hardness, especially his purpose of squeezing "all the water" out of his words. At the same time, I was individualistic by nature and did not want to imitate anyone--even if I did it. In the late 1960's, I was influ- enced by my reading the works of (and talking personally, for my 1972 section of How I Write / 2) Don L. Lee, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni. I was impressed by the character and work of Dudley Randall, whom I had not yet met, but with whom I had corresponded from Grenoble, France, in suggesting and promoting the idea that became the Broadside Critics Series of which I was the General Editor during its several years of existence. Dudley also published by first two volumes of poetry at Broadside Press, The Treehouse and Other Poems and Panther Man. Panther Man reflected the influence of my City College students, who, with a tolerance of my need to adjust again to the USA after my 1968-1969 stay in France, taught me their own need of a special kind of poetry. A special influence, of course, was Langston Hughes, whose effect was more immediate and continual than my affinity for the work of Richard Write and W.E.B. DuBois, each of whom I considered for the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia. I admired Langston's poetic purpose as much as I admired his work. In my dissertation on him, I argued for the superiority of some of his short stories; and in my book for the Twayne series I defended what I considered the excellence of some of his poems. His purposes as a poet influenced

Full description

Typed letter to Douglas Watson from James Emanuel, dated December 3, 1981. Emanuel responds to an earlier letter from Watson and speaks about his influences and writing practices (Page 2).

  • type
    Image
  • created on
  • file format
    jpg
  • file size
    18 MB
  • container title
    James A. Emanuel Papers
  • creator
    James A. Emanuel
  • issue
    Box 4 Folder 7, Watson, Douglas, 1981-1993
  • rights
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • rights holder
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • version
    9-Dec-81