The World Has Changed Read Online Free PDF

Dostoyevsky, who found his truths where everyone else seemed afraid to look, and Turgenev, Gorky, and Gogol—who made me think that Russia must have something floating about in the air that writers breathe from the time they are born. The only thing that began to bother me, many years later, was that I could find almost nothing written by a Russian woman writer.
    Unless poetry has mystery, many meanings, and some ambiguities
(necessary for mystery) I am not interested in it. Outside of Bashō and Issa and other Japanese haiku poets, I read and was impressed by the poetry of Li Po, the Chinese poet, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings (deeply), and Robert Graves—especially his poems in Man Does, Woman Is , which is surely a pure male-chauvinist title, but I did not think about that then. I liked Graves because he took it as given that passionate love between man and woman does not last forever. He enjoyed the moment and didn’t bother about the future. My poem “The Man in the Yellow Terry” is very much influenced by Graves.
    I also loved Ovid and Catullus. During the whole period of discovering haiku and the sensual poems of Ovid, the poems of e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, my feet did not touch the ground. I ate, I slept, I studied other things (like European history) without ever doing more than giving it serious thought. It could not change me from one moment to the next, as poetry could.
    I wish I had been familiar with the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks when I was in college. I stumbled on them later. If there was ever a born poet, I think it is Brooks. Her natural way of looking at anything, of commenting on anything, comes out as a vision, in language that is peculiar to her. It is clear that she is a poet from the way your whole spiritual past begins to float around in your throat when you are reading, just as it is clear from the first line of Cane that Jean Toomer is a poet, blessed with a soul that is surprised by nothing. It is not unusual to weep when reading Brooks, just as when reading Toomer’s “Song of the Son” it is not unusual to comprehend—in a flash—what a dozen books on black people’s history fail to illuminate. I have embarrassed my classes occasionally by standing in front of them in tears as Toomer’s poem about “some genius from the South” flew through my body like a swarm of golden butterflies on their way toward a destructive sun. Like Du Bois, Toomer was capable of comprehending the black soul. It is not “soul” that can become a cliché, but rather something to be illuminated rather than explained.
    The poetry of Arna Bontemps has strange effects on me too. He is a great poet, even if he is not recognized as such until after his death. Or is never acknowledged. The passion and compassion in his poem “A Black Man Talks of Reaping” shook the room I was sitting in the first time I read it. The ceiling began to revolve and a breeze—all the way from Alabama—blew through the room. A tide of spiritual good
health tingled the bottom of my toes. I changed. Became someone the same, but different. I understood, at last, what the transference of energy was.
    It is impossible to list all of the influences on one’s work. How can you even remember the indelible impression upon you of a certain look on your mother’s face? But random influences are these: music, which is the art I most envy.
    Then there’s travel—which really made me love the world, its vastness and variety. How moved I was to know that there is no center of the universe. Entebbe, Uganda, or Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, exist no matter what we are doing here. Some writers—Camara Laye, or the man who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude [Gabriel García Márquez]—have illumined this fact brilliantly in their fiction, which brings me to African writers I hope to be influenced by: Okot p’tek has written my favorite modern poem, “Song of Lawino.” I am also crazy about The Concubine by Elechi Ahmadi (a