Inscribing My Name

Selected Poems: New, Used, and Repossessed

Herbert Woodward Martin

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781631010521
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

Selected poems from a respected African American poet

Visit our Events page for details about the Kent screening of the new film Jump Back, Honey: The Poetry and Performance of Herbert Woodward Martin.

Herbert Woodward Martin's body of poetry from the past five decades is, in many ways, matched by no one else. His many poetic voices range from quiet lyrics to angry protest poems, from groundbreaking counterpoint structures to prize-winning historical narratives. His wide-ranging poetry acts as a barometer of various times and tempers in American literature. His poetry is innovative and balanced and has a special way of working within traditions even as it creates its own unique space.

Martin's poetry captures life in the Midwest through the authenticity of his voice, his dramatic sense, and the wonderful innovation of his multidisciplinary talents (poet, scholar, teacher, librettist, and performer). From his first volume of poetry in 1969 to Inscribing My Name, Martin's work brings alive important issues and struggles in our understanding of what it means to be human. This accomplished body of work is a unique combination of traditional poetic forms, the African American musical tradition, and Martin's extensive experience creating and performing theater and opera.

CONTRAPUNTAL PIECE NO. 1

A Fable of Two Thoughts

for Sally

Around the corner from where I am,

If I could tell you what love is I would

A young man stands in his waiting.

Once I thought it fleeting past my door

Down a summer’s street a girl, becoming woman, comes closer.

Possessed the glimpse in the eyes’ crevice.

They will seize each other’s existence.

I do not know what love is

“Lady,” he will say, “the smell of your black hair

Suspect I never will,

The touch of your lips against my collar-bone,

Since my too brief gaze at the soul has

Attract, the strength of me.”

Vanished between the lines of sunrise and twilight

If lovers can love and feel no shame

Ambivalence is the emotion between these lines

They can part and feel no duty.

Where sunrise and twilight guard

The soul-secret in its primeval.

CONTRAPUNTAL PIECE NO. 2

A Smile, a Hand, a Heart: Love Begins This Way

You are on the right.	I am on the left.
Opposition.	Counterpoint.
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MORALS.
Are you saying?	Recommending.
Is it …?	Sorrow?
Gravel against grain,	We counter
Each other’s emotion.	Content yourself
THERE IS NO MODERATE GROUND.
	We stand at too far a distance
The distance is too far for hands
BEST, THE HEART SPANS SPACE.
Does it?	Does it.
	I contemplate you on hectic ground
Yet, if the heart gestures, the element is in the sound
No, in the graph that moves up, moves up, moves down
Speak individual, not for other men
Where truth resides	Emotion is a word
The ear positive to hear	The eye is sure to see
The tongue definite to speak
TRUTH, THEN, IS A STATE OF MIND.

CONTRAPUNTAL PIECE NO. 3

Man      Woman

I. a round

I thought as we were walking opposite ways

I thought as we were walking opposite ways

One of us might have turned, called to the other

One of us might have turned, called to the other

A sentence of reconsideration, yet, less by less

A sentence of reconsideration, yet, less by less

The obvious turn over distance withers irrevocably.

The obvious turn over distance withers irrevocably.

II. contrapuntal

Now are we of a particular hope, prisoners.

Swift, fall leaves the stone-walk.

We claw up essential ladders.

We walk down an autumn.

Despite what seems, and what is not legitimate

Nuance is an interminable path.

Let us say in recollection,

As we become the variant,

Each rung is a step toward

A strife of light,

The expanse of all our distances,

Falls cataract on our eyes

And our hopes are all that is left of a continuum.

CONTRAPUNTAL PIECES FOR CENTRAL PARK WEST NO. 4

for Tom Howard

I

Pausing in the bend of a corner

If the fiction must be told

To windowshop himself come and gone

This is the way it ought to read

There was a man walking Negro

He is sitting on wood and stone

Down where he trembled

Seeking to intrigue you with the level of his eyes

Under the edge of his mind

Deep beyond the cornea

Gazing upon prospect,

Where emotion paces this sidewalk

Realizing, alone, the night is long

Discovering a remote frailty

Being driven to companion it by twelve

He admits only to the darkness of his palm

Dimensions with that bruised secret.

Beneath an extinguished street lamp

He cripples his feet to the form of pavement,

Affords himself a dream of warmth and brandy

Knowing end is always caught in distances

To calm the effect of waiting

And beginnings lie vaguely on the tip of the tongue.

II

I suffer that body which is intimately yours

In particular moments of our genesis

Having felt you where my depth lies

He bears your pain as you his love

Deep within our separate discoveries

So much of you exists in whispers

That I confess pulse-breath

Between the dream and the act.

CONTRAPUNTAL NO. 5

In the Very Savage Fall

for Joseph Fennimore

with the most precious thing I know

In the very august of the mind

When savage fall the time of rain

The plumb that seeks the depth

In glass puddle, eyes see a room

Finds the circle hollow beneath

The exquisite e...