Poetry as Archive

James A. Emanuel was an archivist though he never identified himself as such. As a poet, he was invested in noting the date, time, and location at the top of each page. He called this method his system of documentation. And prior to his system of documentation, when a poem was published or republished, he would include two dates: on the left, the date the poem was completed, and on the right, the date it was published. As a scholar, Emanuel focused on the preservation and promotion of African-American literature. In his 1965 interview with Langston Hughes, Emanuel asks Hughes “what do you remember about the circumstances of [poetic] composition, the dates, or any other factual data that might be important” (Emanuel “Interview with Langston Hughes”). These “dates” and “data” were important to Emanuel’s organization of Hughes’s papers and his interpretation of Hughes’s short stories for his monograph, Langston Hughes, which is the first book-length study of the author. Additionally, dating back to the 1960s, Emanuel kept a copy of many the letters he wrote to others. And while Emanuel was still living, he made his papers accessible for research at the Library of Congress and invited others to contribute materials to his collection. Emanuel had archival practices in his creative writing, literary scholarship, and in his correspondences with others. 

In “Archives of the Black Diaspora,” Melanie Chambliss explains that early Black archives differed from abolitionist materials collected by institutions like Oberlin College or the Library of Congress. Chambliss notes, “Black archives fostered this excitement around the study of Black history because their very existence challenged racist ideas about Black people, and these archives' accessibility meant that more individuals could do the same (Chambliss, Edwards, and Mitchell 21). Emanuel’s papers at the Library of Congress function similar to these early Black archives even as his materials are collected by the Library of Congress. His correspondences, pedagogical materials, and publicity documents show an excitement about Black history and literature; however, the most exemplary papers of Black heritage are his poetry.

In his textbook A Poet’s Mind, Emanuel explains how his poetics preserve Black history. He defines Black poetry as:

[P]oetry written by Black Americans. But in order that their race might lose none of its past, Black authors would accept a racial label placed upon certain styles of speech and thought, upon certain habits, and upon a long train of facts and events that, inside and outside their poems, preserve their ancestral life.

Enanuel’s poems “Little Old Black Historian,” “Where Will Their Names Go Down?,”“For Young Blacks, the Lost Generation (Newsweek, 8/14/78),” and “White-Belly Justice: A New York Souvenir,” are all examples of “Black poetry.” But more than that, these poems align with Christel Temple’s framework of ancestor acknowledgement, which involves referencing and affirming ancestors’ names, works, narratives, and geographies (Temple 85). By applying Temple’s framework to Emanuel's poetry, I argue that Emanuel’s poetry is a cultural memory archive that records and preserves Black history and legacy through ancestor acknowledgment.