Amen, Mr. Randall

A Poet Is Not a Jukebox

A poet is not a jukebox, so don’t tell me what to write.
I read a dear friend a poem about love, and she said,
“You’re in to that bag now, for whatever it’s worth,
But why don’t you write about the riot in Miami?”[1]
I didn’t write about Miami because I didn’t know about Miami.
I’ve been so busy working for the Census, and listening to music all night,
and making new poems
That I’ve broken my habit of watching TV and reading newspapers.
So it wasn’t absence of Black Pride that caused me not to write about Miami,
But simple ignorance.

Telling a Black poet what he ought to write
Is like some Commissar of Culture in Russia telling a poet
He’d better write about the new steel furnaces in the Novobigorsk region,
Or the heroic feats of Soviet labor in digging the trans-Caucasus Canal,
Or the unprecedented achievement of workers in the sugar beet industry
who exceeded their quota by 400 percent (it was later discovered to
be a typist’s error).

Maybe the Russian poet is watching his mother die of cancer,
Or is bleeding from an unhappy love affair,
Or is bursting with happiness and wants to sing of wine, roses, and nightingales.

I’ll bet that in a hundred years the poems the Russian people will read, sing and love
Will be the poems about his mother’s death, his unfaithful mistress, or his
wine, roses and nightingales,
Not the poems about steel furnaces, the trans-Caucasus Canal, or the sugar
beet industry.
A poet writes about what he feels, what agitates his heart and sets his pen in motion.
Not what some apparatchnik[2] dictates, to promote his own career of theories.

Yeah, maybe I’ll write about Miami, as I wrote about Birmingham,[3]
But it’ll be because I want to write about Miami, not because somebody
says I ought to.

Yeah, I write about love. What’s wrong with love?
If we had more loving, we’d have more Black babies to become Black brothers and
sisters and build the Black family.

When people love, they bathe with sweet-smelling soap, splash their bodies
with perfume or cologne,
Shave, and comb their hair, and put on gleaming silken garments,
Speak softly and kindly and study their beloved to anticipate and satisfy her
every desire.
After loving they’re relaxed and happy and friends with all the world.
What’s wrong with love, beauty, joy and peace?

If Josephine had given Napoleon more loving, he wouldn’t have sown the
meadows of Europe with skulls.
If Hitler had been happy in love, he wouldn’t have baked people in ovens.[4]
So don’t tell me it’s trivial and a cop-out to write about love and not about Miami.

A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
I repeat, A poet is not a jukebox for someone to shove a quarter in his ear
and get the tune they want to hear,
Or to pat on the head and call “a good little Revolutionary,”
Or to give a Kuumba Liberation Award.[5]
A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.

So don’t tell me what to write.

—Dudley Randall

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[1]  In 1980, perhaps one of the severest race riots of the century, in which Blacks took revenge for the killing of a Black man by four white policemen.

[2]  Flunky, minor civil servant.

[3]  Site of nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations led by the Black leader Martin Luther King, Jr., which were met with attack dogs, tear gas, cattle prods, and fire hoses.

[4]  Napoleon, French conqueror of Europe, married Josephine in 1796 and divorced her in 1809; gas ovens were only one feature of Adolf Hitler’s extermination camps.

[5]  Randall received a Kuumba Award in 1973.

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I decided to include the notes that came with the poem, because they help to explain what the writer was feeling at that time.  This is one of my favorite poems, by one of my all-time favorite poets.

Marcus Jamison, the Rare Poet