After the work of art thread, I felt compelled to share the art of poetry. Though poetry utilizes a different medium than painting and sculpture, its illustrations are often equally vivid.
Seeing as she is one of my favorite poets (as well as a respected poet in her own right), I felt it would be appropriate for me to share the work of Georgia Douglas Johnson.
For those who weren't aware of Georgia Douglas Johnson prior to today, below is a synopsis of her life and career.
quote:Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Georgia Douglas Johnson made her way to Washington, D.C., where she lived for over fifty years at 1461 S Street NW, site of one of the greatest literary salons of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson was the most famous woman poet of that literary movement, publishing four volumes of poetry: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World (1962). Johnson's life illustrates the difficulties faced by African American women writers in the first half of the century. A graduate of Atlanta University (1896), where she met her husband, Henry Lincoln Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson did not publish her first poem until 1916, when she was thirty-six, and she remained geographically removed from the major literary circles of her day, which were in Harlem, due to her marriage to a Washington lawyer and civil employee. Her husband, moreover, expected her to look after the home and assume primary responsibility for the upbringing of two sons. When he died in 1925, Georgia Douglas Johnson was forty-five years old with two teenagers to support. Holding a series of temporary jobs between 1924 and 1934 as a substitute public school teacher and a file clerk for the Civil Service, she ultimately found a position with the Commissioner of Immigration for the Department of Labor, where hours were long and pay low. Johnson had to create her own supportive environment by establishing the Saturday night open houses that she hosted weekly soon after her husband's death and that included Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and others. Although it was hard for her to write, she was able to follow through on her successes with her first two volumes of poetry by completing a third volume in 1928 that is arguably her best. An Autumn Love Cycle confirmed Johnson as the first African American woman poet to garner national attention since Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Johnson traveled extensively in the late 1920s, giving lectures and readings, meeting Carl Sandburg in Chicago and Charles Waddell Chesnutt in Cleveland while receiving awards from various organizations, including her alma mater, Atlanta University. She was able to send her sons to Howard University, where they studied law and medicine, while maintaining a demanding work and travel schedule. Through the pioneering work of Gloria Hull, we now know that Johnson wrote a substantial number of plays during the 1920s, including Plumes, which won first prize in a contest run by Opportunity in 1927, and Blue Blood, performed by the Krigwa Players in New York City during the fall of 1926 and published the following year. Twenty-eight dramas are listed in the "Catalogue of Writings" that Johnson compiled in 1962-1963, but only a handful have been recovered. She also listed a book-length manuscript about her literary salon, a collection of short stories, and a novel, which were lost as well. Of thirty-one short stories listed in her catalog, only three have been located, under the pseudonym of Paul Tremaine (two of these were published in Dorothy West's journal Challenge in 1936 and 1937). Probably much of this material was thrown away by workers clearing out Johnson's house when she died in 1966.
The following are selected poems from Johnson's various publications.
The Suppliant
Long have I beat with timid hands upon life's leaden door, Praying the patient, futile prayer my fathers prayed before, Yet I remain without the close, unheeded and unheard, And never to my listening ear is borne the waited word.
Soft o'er the threshold of the years there comes this counsel cool: The strong demand, contend, prevail; the beggar is a fool!
Your World
Your world is as big as you make it. I know, for I used to abide In the narrowest nest in a corner, My wings pressing close to my side. But I sighted the distant horizon Where the skyline encircled the sea And I throbbed with a burning desire To travel this immensity. I battered the cordons around me And cradled my wings on the breeze, Then soared to the uttermost reaches With rapture, with power, with ease!
Welt
Would I might mend the fabric of my youth That daily flaunts its tatters to my eyes, Would I might compromise awhile with truth Until our moon now waxing, wanes and dies.
For I would go a further while with you, And drain this cup so tantalant and fair Which meets my parched lips like cooling dew, Ere time has brushed cold fingers thru my hair!
The Heart of a Woman
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn, As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on, Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night, And enters some alien cage in its plight, And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
I Want to Die While You Love Me (One of my personal favorites)
I want to die while you love me, While yet you hold me fair, While laughter lies upon my lips And lights are in my hair.
I want to die while you love me, And bear to that still bed, Your kisses turbulent, unspent, To warm me when I'm dead.
I want to die while you love me, Oh, who would care to live Till love has nothing more to ask And nothing more to give!
I want to die while you love me And never, never see The glory of this perfect day Grow dim or cease to be.
Woe to the Circus Peanut Observe the lonely circus peanut Alone in its isle gathering dust The circus peanut cries Then dissolves For it is made of sugar Poor, poor lonely circus peanut You are no more.
Chick-A-Fill Your life has been spared The chicken is on the bun Rejoyce, cow, rejoyce
To be, or not to be, that is the quetion. Whether 'tis nobler of the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to arm oneself against a sea of sorrows. To die, to sleep to sleep perchance to dream and in these dreams ......
-shit-
to die, to sleep, no more and in this dream of death to shuffle off the mortal coil....
