A Poet's Mind, "A Key for a Poet" (1)

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II . A Key for a Poet "Any identifying marks?" the police would ask, if you reported a person missing. If you said "He's a poet, " your reply would be thought, at its best, unresponsive. Yet, as Thomas Mann observed, a poet has a mark on his brow. Its origin and its exact nature are mysteries, but its effect has made names like Keats and Whitman possessions of everyone who knows Englisb. The poems in this chapter concern that mark. Altbougb a poet, by definition, must write poetry witb considerable regularity, he must also-for reasons as common as rent and curiosity--do otber things. "A Poet Does Not Cboose to Run," like "To the Negro Children of Mount Vernon," shows me running for public office in New York during one of the school integration wars that flamed across the USA in tbe 1960' s. Both poems are based on my own experience of dangerous forms of revenge suf fered by Black people during that violent period. On the other hand, "ANegro Author" suggests how I, like most Black authors after be mid-1960's, had to struggle within the hard demands and slippery uncertainties of the þÿ r6 e6 s6 i6 loi6t le6 rary view that grew to be called The Black Aesthetic (the title of a book published in 1971, containing a long article of mine). Those "other things" done by a poet include his public readings of bis works, an activity that seems, to some

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James A. Emanuel's draft of "A Key for a Poet" in the second section of his textbook A Poet's Mind. He discusses identifying marks of his life as a poet.

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  • type
    Image
  • created on
  • file format
    jpg
  • file size
    3 MB
  • container title
    James A. Emanuel Papers
  • creator
    James A. Emanuel
  • issue
    Box 8 Folder 13 A Poet’s Mind, draft B, 1982
  • rights
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • rights holder
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • version
    Draft B