A Poet Returns to Dorsey, Shares Works--and Pain

Memories are old identities.

--William Butler Yeats

No one strolls casually onto the inner-city campus of Dorsey High School. At the school’s main entrance, a polite, smiling young woman with a two-way radio inquires after a stranger’s business and then escorts the visitor in. Most doors are kept locked. Metal grids protect many classroom windows. Administrators responsible for school security wear harried expressions and also carry two-way radios.

Thirty-two years ago the campus in the Crenshaw area was much more open. So Michael S. Harper, a 1955 Dorsey alumnus who’s now an award-winning poet and Ivy League professor, was in for a few surprises when he returned to his alma mater last Friday for the first time since graduation.

Harper was brought back from his present home in Providence, R.I., where he’s a professor of English at Brown University, through Joint Ventures in Poetry, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The project, which was administered by Cal State Los Angeles (where Harper earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English), also brought poets Garrett Kaoru Hongo and Gary Soto to town “to develop new audiences for poetry, and to develop a bridge to people who think of poetry as some sort of alien non-life,” said Carl Selkin, an associate professor of English who directs the university’s writing center.

Busy Schedules

Each poet gave a reading at Cal State L.A., visited a local high school and read works at a local museum (Harper at the California Afro-American Museum, Hongo at the Pacific Asia and Soto at the Southwest).

Returning to his old high school did not call up pleasant memories for Harper, who in recent years has won such prestigious prizes as the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award.

Harper, 48, moved here from Brooklyn with his family in 1951. “During the first year we moved here, there were homes being bombed” by racists in his neighborhood, which was then mostly white, he told a general assembly of 250 students enrolled in the high school’s magnet (college-incentive) program. “The neighborhood you consider just your neighborhood now was up for contention.”

Some fidgeting, rustling and coughing accompanied Harper’s talk, but most of the students listened attentively.

“I don’t remember my (high school) teachers very well,” Harper told the students. “I was not as good a student as I might have been. . . . I was always in trouble with my father. He’d mention something one time, and the next time he mentioned it, it was death! My father could not be negotiated with. . . . The day before I graduated from high school, I wrecked my father’s car--it wasn’t my fault,” he said, and a young male voice called out, ironically, “Yeah.”

Harper mixed memories with his own poems and poems by writers Robert Hayden, Rita Dove and Robert Frost. Then he took questions from the students.

Importance of Revision

“How many days or hours does it take you to write down a poem after you get the inspiration for it?” one girl asked.

“It depends,” Harper said. “When I first started (writing) I would write a poem down, and that was the end of it. But as I got older and wiser” he learned the importance of revision, he said.

“I don’t want to minimize inspiration,” Harper added, “but if you are going to be a practicing writer, a poet, you are going to have to (establish) a discipline” for writing.

Stacey Ford, 17, wanted an explanation of “Here Where Coltrane Is,” a Harper poem she’d read in her English class.

The poem was written almost 20 years ago, Harper said, and “it’s about what I wanted to give my child, the legacy” of his race and culture.

Ford, not entirely satisfied with that answer, pressed harder for an explanation when Harper visited a special “master’s class” of 13 advanced English students after the assembly.

“When I asked you the question about the poem, you kind of touched base” but didn’t really explain the piece, Ford complained. “I was kind of lost in the poem.”

“Where were you lost? Be specific,” Harper commanded.

Poetic Goals

Ford read a little of “Here Where Coltrane Is,” and Harper launched into a 90-minute talk about his poetic goals and the importance of language and history.

“Poetry is about retrospection, it’s about thinking about (an event) after the fact,” Harper told the students. Words’ “valence” (a chemistry term denoting one element’s ability to combine with other elements) is important, he added.

For instance, “blues is a charged word,” he said, quoting one definition of blues music: “ ‘The blues ain’t nothin’ but a poor man’s heart disease.’ Now you could go for days on (the meaning of) that,” Harper said.

He wrote the poems in his eight published books from “a need I had to see the things that are most important to me put in a context where they were manageable and where they can make sense,” Harper said.

Harper’s image-filled poems frequently draw upon events in his personal history and from black history in general. Other topics he’s addressed include race relations, war and jazz musicians’ lives.

Because his poetic language can be dense, he’s sometimes been criticized for writing obscure poems, Harper said. However, he dislikes giving rationalizations for his images.

“A rationalization is providing good reasons for real ones,” he said, “but poetry defies rationality. When you’re in the process of composing something, it’s different than talking about it. It’s one thing to talk about taking Mary out, and it’s different to actually take Mary out,” he said, and smiled. “The justification is not nearly as important as the impulse.”

After class, Ford told a reporter that she has “only met two poets, him and Maya Angelou, and I want to meet some more. . . . I’m going to the library today and check out a book” of poetry.

Getting Mileage

Having a poet like Harper come to the campus “is awfully helpful,” said Dean Schenker, who’s taught English at Dorsey for four years. “I can refer to Michael Harper with these 10th-graders for two or three years” and still get mileage from the visit, Schenker said.

Was visiting Dorsey a good thing for Harper himself? Leaving the campus, the poet laughed at the question. “I think ultimately it might be,” Harper said. “I just have to be a grown-up about this, and ferret out the emotions.”

He was not shocked by the changes at his school, Harper said, although with its tight security the campus seemed “like a prison” to him.

“I did not come expecting to return to what life was like in 1955,” Harper said, but “at the same time, when I hit campus, where the layout is pretty much the same, some memories began coming back to me.”

Harper’s high school memories include encounters with a chemistry teacher who “made life miserable for us (the school’s few blacks)” by consistently making them stay after school. Harper said he also was discouraged from trying out for the school’s tennis team because he was black.

In addition, Harper recalls a teacher advising him to attend Los Angeles City College rather than UCLA “because ‘you don’t write well enough to go to UCLA,’ ” he said.

Different Life

Coming back to Dorsey reopened some of those old “wounds,” Harper said. Yet, he added, “I liked talking to the students, and it was useful, meaningful to have them come up afterward and ask questions.”

Harper’s present life is very different from his past. After his education in Los Angeles, he earned a second master’s degree in English in the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Program before being hired by Brown in 1970. He now teaches both writing and literature courses at Brown.

Married to an artist-photographer, Shirley, Harper has three children, 14, 17 and 20, and lives in downtown Providence. His last book, “Healing Songs for the Inner Ear,” was published in 1985 by the University of Illinois Press.

“Going back to Dorsey--I don’t know what that’s going to produce,” Harper said quietly. “I like to brood on things. . . . I didn’t think returning to Dorsey High School would be without cost. It stirs the waters” of memory.