Black Art, American Art

In the American ethnic chorus, there are some songs that only some singers can sing and others that every group sings in its own way. Thursday, on the 20th anniversary, to the day, of the opening of Ambassador Auditorium, the Ambassador Foundation presented its Award for Excellence to soprano Leontyne Price after a concert at which Price sang, among other works, Giuseppe Verdi’s Pace, pace mio Dio.

When Price sings Verdi, is white music sung in a black way? We might better say that 19th-Century Italian music is sung in a Leontynian way. But Italian grand opera, when a black diva sings it, becomes a part of the greater black American sound and, in turn, a part of the greater American sound.

Last Tuesday, at the Claremont Graduate School, the $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award--the largest in the world awarded for a given title--was presented to poet Yusef Komunyakaa for his collection “Neon Vernacular.” Some of Komunyakaa’s themes lie deep in the least communicable part of black American experience. His success here may in fact be his greatest success. But a good many of his themes are, so to put it, a black rendition of songs that non-blacks also sing. Consider the opening lines of his widely anthologized “Facing It”:

My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn’t, dammit: No tears. I’m stone. I’m flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile

of night slanted against morning. I turn

this way--the stone lets me go. I turn that way--I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference.

Visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not, in any exclusive sense, “the black experience,” but a black face reflects back from the black granite in its own way.

Komunyakaa, a veteran of the military, makes poetry of the moment not in “black English” but in a vernacular English that every American ear can hear. He writes for everybody, as Leontyne Price sings for everybody. Last week, a good few Southern Californians seemed to be listening.