Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems

by Robert Hayden

Nothing superfluous, nothing lacking. William Hazlitt’s highest praise for good prose can justly be applied to the poetry of Robert Hayden. In his new poems, as before, but with a new mixture of modes, Hayden takes up, celebrates, and contends with the history of his people. He is involved with his Black Americanness, without being confined by it. The famous story elements can be found here but above all a renewed delight in the revelatory possibilities of the languages. In addition to the new poems, all the best of Hayden’s earlier work is here, including much that has for too long been unavailable.

Genres: Poetry, African American

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Robert Hayden was an American poet, essayist, educator. He was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1976.

Hayden was elected to the American Academy of Poets in 1975. From 1976 - 1978, Hayden was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the first African American holder of that post), the position which in 1985 became the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hayden's most famous and most anthologized poem is Those Winter Sundays[citation needed], which deals with the memory of fatherly love and loneliness.

Other famed poems include The Whipping (which is about a small boy being severely punished for some undetermined offense), Middle Passage (inspired by the events surrounding the United States v. The Amistad affair), Runagate, Runagate, and Frederick Douglass.

Hayden’s influences included Wylie, Cullen, Dunbar, Hughes, Bontemps, Keats, Auden and Yeats. Hayden’s work often addressed the plight of African Americans, usually using his former home of Paradise Valley slum as a backdrop, as he does in the poem Heart-Shape in the Dust. Hayden’s work made ready use of black vernacular and folk speech. Hayden wrote political poetry as well, including a sequence on the Vietnam War.

On the first poem of the sequence, he said, “I was trying to convey the idea that the horrors of the war became a kind of presence, and they were with you in the most personal and intimate activity, having your meals and so on. Everything was touched by the horror and the brutality and criminality of war. I feel that's one of the best of the poems.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book because of the influence that Hayden has visibly exerted on many of today's most exciting poets -- poets like Eduardo Corral and Erica Dawson, to name just a couple.

Hayden's poems, especially those from the earlier part of his career, tend to be written in an unimpeachably concise, meditatively paced, formally deliberate mode that at times reminded me strongly of his contemporary (and fellow Midwesterner) Lorine Niedecker. Although he rarely uses rhyme or meter, Hayden is nonetheless remarkably attentive to form, both aural and visual, in his own unique way: he purposefully varies his line lengths and stanza lengths in such a way as to give his poems a tessellated appearance on the page that would give geometers wet dreams. On top of this, he often uses indentations of different width for different lines, bestowing on his stanzas an elaborately patterned look that would make George Herbert proud.

The tastemakers of past eras -- both the compilers of poetry anthologies and the writers who, like Amiri Baraka, vocally criticized the compilers of poetry anthologies -- have passed down to us a distorted view of Robert Hayden: he is now, rather unjustly, remembered chiefly for his tranquil domestic lyrics like "Those Winter Sundays" and for his refined ekphrastic poems like "Monet's Waterlilies." College students these days are introduced to Hayden via self-contained little poems like "The Performers," an unrhymed sonnet wherein the speaker is a well-mannered middle-class gentleman possessed of a desk job at which he can observe (from a safe distance) the working classes living out their lives of risk and struggle. Given this manner of introduction, it is no wonder that many of today's students walk away from their classrooms harboring the false impression that Hayden was nothing more than a maker of fine-spun poems, genteel and urbane, from which the violence of life has all but been sublimated out. Before I read this book, that was how I thought about Hayden, too. I was wrong.

For every poem like "Those Winter Sundays" in this collection, there is a poem like "The Whipping" that unflinchingly interrogates the harrowing violence that always underlies -- and sometimes breaks through -- the facade of domestic tranquility that "These Winter Sundays" seems content to celebrate. Angle of Ascent is thick with poems that devastatingly dissect every era of American history, from the dark ages of slavery ("Middle Passage") to the Civil War ("The Dream") to the Holocaust ("Belsen, Day of Liberation") to the years of carnage surrounding the fight for civil rights ("Night, Death, Mississippi"). Refusing to sugarcoat or whitewash reality but also never giving way to melodrama, Hayden's clear-eyed verse documents a world marred by unspeakable evils: some of the poems (e.g., "The Diver") are terrifying in their bleakness, wearing like a skull-and-bones brooch their searing despair, their undisguised death-wish. Although he found some comfort in the Baha'i faith, Hayden was also skeptical of those who view religion as a cure-all or explain-all, throwing shade at the superstitious in biting poems like "Electrical Storm" and "Witch Doctor." (This vision of superstition as a woefully inadequate bandage for tragedies gets taken to its chilling natural conclusion in the masterly ballad "'Incense of the Lucky Virgin.'") These are quintessentially American poems, probing our nation's raw wounds, not sadistically or superfluously, but with a doctor's meticulousness and care, a wise surgeon's recognition that some wounds will always remain raw.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Moose Wallow

Friends warned of moose that
often came to the wallow
near the path I took.

I feared, hoped to see
the tall ungainly creatures
in their battle crowns.

I felt their presence
in the dark (hidden watchers)
on either side.

Though heavier on the "Selected" than on the "New," Robert Hayden's collection Angle of Ascent shows Hayden building upon the strengths he showed in his first collection A Ballad of Remembrance a decade earlier. He examines his lineage ("Beginnings") as well as the import of stars ("Stars") in addition to poems about being an angel visiting earth ("For a Young Artist"), Egyptian portrait masks, and butterfly art. Granted, there's not many new poems here, but the ones that are indicate that Hayden has not lost any of his poetic skills or sensibilities.

Another worthy volume of poetry.

For a Young Artist

Sprawled in the pigsty,
snouts nudging snuffling him--
a naked old man
with bloodstained wings.

Fallen from the August sky?
Dead? Alive?
But he twists away

from the cattle-prod, wings
jerking, lifts his grizzled head,
regarding all
with searching eyes.

Neither smiles nor threats,
dumbshow nor lingua franca
were of any use to those
trying for clues to him.

They could not make him hide
his nakedness
in their faded hand-me-downs.

Humane, if hostile and afraid,
they spread him a pallet
in the chicken-house.
The rooster pecked his wings.

Leftovers were set out for him;
he ate sunflowers
instead and the lice crawling his feathers.

Carloads of the curious paid
his clever hosts to see the
actual angel? carny freak?
in the barbedwire pen.

They crossed themselves and prayed
his blessing;
catcalled and chunked at him.

In the dark his heavy wings
open and shut, stiffly spread
like a wooden butterfly's.

He leaps, board wings clum-
sily flapping, big sex
flopping, falls.

The hawk-haunted fowl
flutter and squawk;
panic squeals in the sty.

He strains, an awk-
ward patsy, sweating strains
leaping falling. Then--

silken rustling in the air,
the angle of ascent
achieved.

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of our great unknown poets. A guy who leans into history as much as, say, Pound, but keeps his history more or less American and moral, not all mystical and economic. And it becomes this hovering force that has in fact crushed lots of people-- and yet, there's some kind of hope glowing at the edge of the darkness--? As a history teacher, I find Hayden's poems more useful for introducing different people and time periods than anything else. (See Middle Passage; Frederick Douglass; John Brown; Night, Death, Mississippi) and then there is of course Those Winter Sundays, which is simply a perfect, unimprovable short poem. Read him immediately.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know I’m not the target audience for these poems. I am not a Black American, and I am reading it in 2025.

Some of these poems will stick with me for years to come; their imagery, their narratives. Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves, Unidentified Flying Object, Monet’s Waterlilies, A Plague of Starlings, An Inference of Mexico, Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday, and The Whipping. Some exciting, some painful.

Some I simply didn’t understand, but that’s on me, not Hayden. No matter your race and experience, this collection is worth reading to the end

[Mills College Library]

811 H415n 1975

[Matt Morris]

Read reviews of this & other books at https://miscmss.blogspot.com/2019/02/...