The Log of the Vigilante. - book review

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by George Elliott Clarke

Herbert Woodward Martin. The Log of the Vigilante. Lewiston: Mellen Poetry P, 2000. 120 pp. $24.95.

African American poetry flaunts two dominant traditions: the simple and the sumptuous. The first category sanctifies exhortation, rhetorical plainness, unadorned truth-telling; the second blesses ornate, elaborate eloquence, ludic loquaciousness. It is the difference between Hughes and Hayden, Dunbar and Dove. However, the tradition of simplicity has never been "simple" (as Hughes's Jesse B. Semple narratives attest), but rather complex, complicated, given its insistence on authenticity of utterance--diction, rhythm, and style. Many are tempted to attempt the "simple" tradition, but few are chosen. For every sterling Sterling Brown, there are a thousand pretenders--preachers, politicos, "rappers" of all sorts, all trying desperately to harness folk speech and "attitude," but ending up as bourgie minstrels or as wanna-be "roots" intellectuals. In his sixth collection of poems, The Log of the Vigilante, Herbert Woodward Martin hews to the tradition of Dunbar and Hughes, perspiring to get soul out and onto paper . His struggle is inspiringly titanic, but only intermittently successful.

The current Poet-in-Residence at the University of Dayton and the Paul Laurence Dunbar Laureate Poet for the city of Dayton, Ohio, the Alabama-born Martin yearns to write lines as supple as silk and as stem as steel. Familiar with writing for music, he has an ear for rhythm and an eye for repetition, and these strengths serve him well, here, in lyrics addressing slavery, segregation, and survival, and which mimic the styles of the spirituals and the Blues.

In his best work, Martin produces lines of pure, hard-core imagism: "The first white men / plowed their way secretly across the waters. / They struck their African prey like divine lightning, / then disappeared as suddenly until the next rains." Or he freshens up "old" song-in the ways that Brown, Henry Dumas, and Jean Toomer could and did:

This morning, this morning, I got the blues;
This morning, this morning, Lord, I have the blues
That old blue feeling is shadowing my heels;
It makes a good lonely girl want to kill.

Elsewhere, Martin takes an historical text, say, David Walker's famous Appeal (1829), and excavates the poetry hidden therein: "I, David Walker, ask two breaths of your time..."; "Silence is a commodity born of the grave..."; "I appeal to the judgment housed in your blood"; "Do not let the passing of those men and women / Be blown away like the dust of many winds."

The Log of the Vigilante is rife with lines of concentrated power, but also with weak art. For instance, the aforecited poem sampling Walker's Appeal ends with a cliche: "Build a stone place / Where memory may safely take refuge." The poem "01800" (Martin uses numbers for titles) provides a vivid catalogue of the goods for which some African monarchs sold their "countrymen into slavery," but concludes with the deja vu nostrum that "Gold, silver, and paper enslave kings as well as ordinary men." In "09000," a twelve-page narrative poem treating the memories of an elderly black woman (and, thus, reminiscent of Ernest J. Gaines's 1971 novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman), Martin inks the original, starkly clear line "Work has peeled away her youth." He follows it, though, with the dull conceit that this history is "Written.., in the multitudinous lines on her face."

And so it goes. Though undeniably talented, Martin exhibits a hesitant sense of what separates the singingly oral from the stodgily ordinary. He writes Blues, but he does not worry the lines; he composes spirituals, but he does not let them come up spontaneously. This limitation is hurtful, for the African American poetics of simplicity, of soul-inspired utterance, is shamelessly merciless toward those who confuse making for being. To make this error is to end up a tad embarrassed--a little like Diana Ross at an Apollo Theatre gala in 1985, when she thought she'd just try to out-sing Patti LaBeile.

[c] 2002 George Elliot Clarke