Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry by Reginald Shepherd

From the Publisher

"Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift---the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings."
---James Longenbach

A highly acute writer, scholar, editor, and critic, Reginald Shepherd brings to his work the sensibilities of a classicist and a contemporary theorist, an inheritor of the American high modernist canon, and a poet drawing and playing on popular culture, while simultaneously venturing into formal experimentation.

In the essays collected here, Shepherd offers probing meditations unified by a "resolute defense of poetry's autonomy, and a celebration of the liberatory and utopian possibilities such autonomy offers." Among the pieces included are an eloquent autobiographical essay setting out in the frankest terms the vicissitudes of a Bronx ghetto childhood; the escape offered by books and "gifted" status preserved by maternal determination; early loss and the equivalent of exile; and the formation of the writer's vocation. With the same frankness that he brings to autobiography, Shepherd also sets out his reasons for rejecting "identity politics" in poetry as an unnecessary trammeling of literary imagination. His study of the "urban pastoral," from Baudelaire through Eliot, Crane, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to Shepherd's own work, provides a fresh view of the place of urban landscape in American poetry.

Throughout his essays---as in his poetry---Shepherd juxtaposes unabashed lyricism, historical awareness, and in-your-face contemporaneity, bristling with intelligence.

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I

I have no records of my earlier life (my previous life, I almost wrote): no baby pictures or childhood memorabilia, no proof of who I was or even that I was at all. I can't even find my original birth certificate. I assume that I must have been because I am now, but all I have is memory, notoriously unreliable and famously changeable.

I have no pictures of myself before 1993 (the year of my first author photo), no photos of my late mother or my younger sister Regina, no way to corroborate, contradict, or simply contextualize the collection of mental fragments that constitutes my childhood. I threw away all my high school and college journals-it was too depressing to be reminded in such detail of past miseries. I also threw out most of my early poems, because I felt them to be mere personal documents, insufficiently achieved as aesthetic objects. (My collected poems will contain no section labeled "Juvenilia.") I miss some of those poems now, their youthful recklessness and rawness, their breaking of rules of which I wasn't even aware, but I don't miss the states of mind that produced them. Between my own disinclination to collect souvenirs of past unhappiness and my highly peripatetic life, I have little documentation of my past selves. For a long time I even had a philosophical objection to such tokens, a determination not to turn my past into a collection of mementos. One's story about oneself can so easily become a burden, though of course that story needs no props.

Now I regret the decisions that stripped me of what little material connection to my past I ever had, but what's done can't be undone, though it can be rewritten. I have only these shards of memory, and memory can't be trusted. I could have been born yesterday, all these things, peoples, and places I think that I remember just planted in my head for some experiment: I've seen such things on TV and in the movies. Sometimes I wish I could retrieve some concrete piece of the past, but when I do I'm usually reminded of why I was so eager to shed them: memory almost always equals misery. Most historical facts are unpleasant, including one's own.

Many (white) (male) (straight) writers these days (fiction writers mostly, but a few poets too) pride themselves on coming from the so-called working class-look how far they've come, look how special they are. I come from less than that, from what used to be called the lumpen proletariat-the people who only intermittently have jobs, who live in fourth-floor walk-up two-room tenement apartments and get by on food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children and sometimes cans of Campbell's cream of celery soup from the church food box (how one got cream from celery was always a mystery to me), single mothers who date numbers runners because they sometimes give them betting tips, and then marry men they barely know (who they later find out already have wives and children back in Jamaica), because they think that being married will give them better lives, give their sons proper male role models. It seems those women always have sons, just one each, and I guess that I was lucky not to be an only son who gets shot one morning on the way to the laundromat just before he was supposed to go off to college on a scholarship. I spent much of my childhood convinced that I would be murdered before my eighteenth birthday (as the news always reminded me, murder was and is the leading cause of death for young black men in America) or, if I managed to reach that milestone, that I'd immediately be drafted to die in the Vietnam War, which had been going on all my life. (I've never believed that one could worry too early or too much.) Instead, I like to say I'm proof that welfare works, or did when it still existed.

II

I was born in Manhattan Woman's Hospital at 3:03 p.m. on April 10, 1963 (or so the birth certificate I finally found says), and grew up in the Bronx in various housing projects and tenements and housing projects (in that order). My mother had moved to New York from Georgia in search of something I don't think even she could name, though clearly she never found it. Supposedly she trained as a nurse for a while, but I never saw any evidence of that. She had wanted to better herself and had just ended up a poverty statistic, part of the Moynihan Report on the breakup of the black family. Not that we'd ever had a family to break up; it was always just the two of us, broke and breaking down. My mother was disappointed in her life and felt both guilty about having brought me into that situation and determined that I would fulfill all her thwarted, inchoate ambitions. I would be smart, I would get scholarships to private schools and get a real education, I would get out of the ghetto and do something good with my life. As she often explained to me, my mother had a plan: she would have two children named Reginald and Regina, and they would both be smart. Though my mother was no good at planning anything, and even worse at carrying out plans, that one she fulfilled to the letter, even if it did take her eleven years.

I remember when I taught myself to read and write-I was no older than four or five, though I have no evidence even of the approximate date. (Sometimes I think that I write to give myself the record of a past, the proof of having lived, that my daily existence has lacked.) I was so excited that I wrote my name over and over again on the living room mirror with a tube of my mother's lipstick. I don't remember if she got angry, or if she did, whether it was over the wasted lipstick or my unthinking vandalism.

My mother often told me that when I was small she never had to worry about leaving me by myself. She had only to give me a book and I'd stay just where she left me. Sometimes she would call me again and again and I wouldn't hear, too absorbed in the words' worlds. I don't have that kind of concentration anymore, though the desire to shut out the world persists.

My mother had only a high school diploma, from the segregated black girls' high school in Macon, Georgia, and came from a dirt-poor family who were hardly intellectual enough to be anti-intellectual. In apparent reaction to her background, she bought me books before I was born, among them a World Book Encyclopedia set, and large and lavishly illustrated books like The Horizon Book of the Renaissance and Time-Life's Wonders of Life on Earth, one of my fondest childhood treasures. I never knew my mother to read anything weightier than a magazine or a TV Guide, except to me when I was very little. (I think that one of the reasons I learned to read so early was that I hated being read to, impatient at having the story unfold at someone else's pace and in someone else's voice, at having someone else intrude into my imaginative escape.) But our apartment was full of books, from Gothic romances in cheap book club editions to a hardcover set of The Kinsey Report, and every week or so we got another encyclopedia volume from the local supermarket along with our TV dinners and cans of condensed soup. Her books, like the photo albums full of pictures of her younger, slimmer self, posed at a window dressed all in black with a cigarette held at a glamorous angle, were souvenirs of a life she had once had or aspired to have, a life on which she had given up. Reading was one of the things my mother had lost in her fall from whatever grace she'd had, one of the things I was to rescue for her. Books were her past and my future.

Though I was a bright and inquisitive child with an instinctive revulsion from the ghetto and the people surrounding us there, it was my mother's determination and vicarious ambition that put me on the path out of the Bronx. She ensured that I was securely enmeshed in a web of standardized tests, tests that proved I was a gifted child, entitled to special treatment. Special in this case meaning better. I've always loved standardized tests, IQ tests and aptitude tests and admissions tests: they're one area of life in which I've always excelled. If the world were run by standardized tests, I'd be a king.

My mother reminded me frequently, on the bus or on the subway or just walking down the street, "You're smarter than 99 percent of the people on this planet, and don't you ever forget it." She wanted me to remember that I was better than my circumstances, and that I was not only able but obligated to get out of them. In neither psychological nor practical terms could I take myself or my life for granted. I had to be special just in order to have the possibility of what's usually considered a normal, ordinary life. (In the ghetto, an ordinary life for a young black man consisted of grinding poverty and a statistically probable early death.) Had I been born middle class, I could have afforded to be ordinary and still have had a decent life; but only by being extraordinary could I escape the ghetto.

My mother got me a full scholarship for the third grade to a private school that was seeking to increase its meager "ethnic and economic diversity," so that I could get out of PS 6, where in the second grade kids sat on my stomach during recess and banged my head into the playground pavement. The Riverdale Country Day School kicked me out after three years because I was "emotionally immature"-the rich white children I got better grades than constantly picked on me, and I always responded, but no matter how sorely provoked I'd been, often in plain sight of the teacher, only I ever got in trouble. But my mother somehow managed to have the State of New York take responsibility for my education, so that I continued to go to private schools, this time at the state's expense, though they had to be special schools for special students.

III

I remember walking home from elementary school (I must have still been in public school, because I took a van to private school) repeating the word "water" to myself until it lost all meaning, transformed into pure sound: two syllables became two notes in a song I couldn't quite sing. But I could a hear a snatch of it, and it enthralled me.

For all my early fascination with words and my often noted talent in "language arts," I had little faith in language's ability to connect me to other people, except in a book or in the voice of a favorite singer. In a book I could travel to distant times and places, be anyone at all; but there were days when I couldn't even communicate with my mother, let alone anyone less intimate. Talking with other people usually only got me into trouble, further exposing my already too apparent freakhood, not to mention my mixed conviction that I was both better and worse than everyone else. Even when I found someone whom I thought actually understood me, I would always eventually come up against a wall between us I couldn't scale. But when I wrote things down, people (teachers mostly) praised them: on the page I was the person I wanted to be and could never approach in my daily life. There I was graceful and worthy of love.

Off the page, I never fit in anywhere and could never figure out how I could or even why I should-fitting in seemed so much like being beaten down, and if I had nothing else I had my pride. Books were my refuge and my friends, along with music and the fantasies I wove out of television's flickering pixels-sometimes all at the same time (I often read while listening to music, and sometimes with the television on as well). Books represented another world than that of the Bronx tenements and housing projects, than that of the public school where I was beaten up and mocked for being an egghead, of the private schools where I was taunted and ostracized because I was poor and black and smarter than the white kids who thought so very much of themselves just because their parents owned the world.

Though we had little money, my mother never denied me anything that I wanted, and what I wanted, besides many too many sugary or salty snacks and bottles of cherry soda, were books and records. Her relatives, and later my abusive Jamaican stepfather, said that my mother spoiled me, but she always replied that sitting at home reading books or listening to records was better than running around on the streets. My stepfather sometimes futilely insisted that I go out to play with the other kids, but I explained that they were a bunch of ragamuffins who would never amount to anything. Even if I'd wanted to play with them, their ideas of fun were bad for my health.

My favorite books were science fiction and fantasy novels (though I was more interested in the worlds than in the plots), and histories of Europe and Asia (American history seemed both too close to home and too mundane)-books that provided experiences of being elsewhere, being somebody else, as far away as possible from my mere life. They allowed me to travel to worlds where being black and poor and rejected by everyone except my mother (who had no friends herself) didn't matter, worlds where I didn't have to be myself.

Besides history and sci-fi, I read books about mythology constantly, mostly Celtic (especially Welsh) and Greek (the Romans just annexed their gods and changed their names). Among my early favorites were the little Mentor paperback of Edith Hamilton's Mythology, a remaindered hardcover edition of Bulfinch's Mythology (though his use of the Greek gods' Roman names annoyed the pedant in me), and D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths (written and illustrated by a married couple whose name seemed delightfully and appropriately exotic), a coffee table book one of my grade school teachers gave me. (I never got along well with other children, but adults and particularly teachers liked me.) I soon graduated to books like The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, the two Penguin paperback volumes of Robert Graves's The Greek Myths, with all its alternative versions of the myths (he left in the homosexuality) and his fascinating and sometimes outrageous speculations, and Graves's The White Goddess, though I couldn't help but note its many glaring errors of fact and interpretation.

I also loved novels based on mythology, like Evangeline Walton's vivid retellings of the four branches of the Mabinogion, the Welsh mythological cycle she brought back to compelling pagan life, or Mary Renault's retellings of the Theseus myth. Renault also wrote historical novels about a proudly homosexual Alexander the Great, and her reimagination of his love for men in a book like The Persian Boy entranced me. Similarly, the out of print and all but forgotten Thomas Burnett Swann's recreations of the worlds of ancient myth, and the imaginative territories where they blurred into ancient history, a lost world of beauty and sensuality, absorbed me, especially his retelling of the David and Jonathan story, which restored the sexuality of the young men's love affair and placed it in the context of a struggle between an accepting and open pagan tradition that celebrated the body and a punitively judgmental monotheism that abjured the flesh. We know which side won, and though Swann's vision of the lost world of paganism was obviously idealized, he made me regret its defeat. I was always ready to identify with the losers, those who didn't get to write the histories. Those books' idealized, chivalric vision of a man's love for another man inspired and seduced me. When I finally, much later, made contact with a gay world not made out of words, I was to be bitterly disappointed.

Greek mythology, like sci-fi and fantasy, represented an elsewhere and an otherwise to my uninterestingly unhappy life, a realm where ordinary misery was ennobled (as I put it in an early poem, "There is no pain. There is only grief"), where things need not be pleasant but they mattered. As someone wrote of Joseph Cornell's magic boxes, there "Anxious need finds the serenity of exalted yearning." In that world suffering and death were made beautiful and important: mundane experience underwent a sea change into something rich and strange. Pain was sublimated, in Hegel's sense, canceled out and raised up, both transcended and made transcendent. Everything in myth meant something, unlike my own unmanageable, amorphous desperation.

Greek mythology presents gods and demigods and heroes who are projections and embodiments of human fears and desires and primal impulses, and it presents them as pure existence, to whom moral or ethical categories don't apply, any more than they apply to hurricanes or tornadoes or sunrises or the light of the full moon over saltwater. In Nietzsche's phrase, they're beyond good and evil, beneath them too (in the sense of being more primal, more basic). The Greek gods are pure force and pure grace and pure beauty, and to look at them directly, without disguise, is to be burned to ash, as Semele was destroyed by gazing upon Zeus in his full glory.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Orpheus in the Bronx by Reginald Shepherd Copyright © 2007 by Reginald Shepherd. Excerpted by permission.
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