A Poet's Mind, "A Key for a Poet" (2)

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past authors, rather artificial copy of/effort to create, efforts sometimes almost heroic their pitiless questions aimedat the self. At my reading on 1 June 1968 for nine-year-old children in Long Island, New York , a boy asked me, "How did you become a poet?" Tbe same d y I wrote a poem to expand my reply. A few years after an initial printing in THE NEW YORK TIMES, it appeared on the inside cover of the New York State Education Commission's booklet that requested all schools to start teaching Black literature. A special circumstance exists when a poet--or any artistis forced to stop creating. That force, which always destroys, moves variously: it might rattle, like interferences in the USSR; it migbt creep, like dying imagination regardless of ' place; or in apparent reversal of the laws of life, it might spread its poison over the artistic will with the authority of some public evil. The poison, in my case, had mounted tbrou b a chain of racist injuries going back t o my childhood when a white policeman laughingly frightened me off the side walk. In 19?0 my creative lights went out, darkened finally by the harmful private effects of racism in my clean suburbia. But relief comes unexpectedly, from surprising sources. It came to me in the shy smiles of a three-year-old French girl , the same Alix for whom I wrote "Wishes." My irst literary recognition of the event is the end poem in this chapter and it was the key to my becoming a poet again.

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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. This key discusses identifying marks of his life as a poet.

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Download image “A Poet's Mind, "A Key for a Poet" (2)”
  • 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