10 Comments
Nov 7Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum

Still thinking about James Weldon Johnson -- his was a poet's sensibility forced to do the demanding and less poetic work of promoting the NAACP and fighting for the ideals he had written of so movingly in "Lift Every Voice....."

Expand full comment
Nov 7Liked by Sally Thomas

This is fascinating. My first reaction was "gosh James Weldon Johnson didn't have children" -- a fact I confirmed on Wikipedia. So this is something he is imagining as a fairly traditional poetic sensibility confronting the new aesthetic of the Harlem Renaissance. No doubt about it -- he was. brilliant.

Expand full comment
Nov 7Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum

I like the ironical humour in this poem.

Expand full comment
Nov 7Liked by Sally Thomas

Well, I know it's poetry, but how does a baby (or anyone) have a "dimpled big toe"? And one must mention his "God's Trombones," which my high school English teacher introduced to a class of all white kids in a sundown town 60 years ago. Great stuff, just throbbing with life and passion.

Expand full comment

I'd forgotten it, but I do believe I read it in high school as well, in a similar time and place.

Expand full comment
Nov 7Liked by Sally Thomas

Nifty poem. A quick Google doesn’t mention any offspring. Did he ever have a son?

Expand full comment
author

No, apparently he and his wife had no children. So the father persona here isn't autobiographical, though it is fairly convincing in its "do as I say, not as I have lived my life" argument. But really it's a frame for arguing something about poetry.

Makes me think, belatedly, of Weldon Kees' "For My Daughter":https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47574/for-my-daughter Interesting coincidence of names, though I *think* it is just coincidence.

Expand full comment
Nov 7Liked by Sally Thomas

Thanks for the history lesson.

Expand full comment
Nov 7Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum

In the words of Waylon and Willie. “Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be…” Two days in a row for poems I think I kind of understand. A record for you guys, or is it me?

Expand full comment
Nov 7·edited Nov 7Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum

Thinking back on high school, I never read this poem; I like it much better than the vaguely somewhat similar poem I do remember from high school, Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Amaryllis." (I went to a historically black high school where the school district set up a science magnet school in an effort to put an end to de facto segregation, and the school library had a rich collection of African American literature, not nearly enough of which I read at the time; that only came after I took a great course on Southern history in college. However, besides large amounts of Dunbar, our school's namesake, and some Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer, I DID read Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and some other of his poems. He was a favorite of mine for a while then.)

Expand full comment