There’s a great deal that remains unknown about the poet I’ve been featuring here this month: Fenton Johnson — but then again, there are some things that I’ve been able to learn about him since I first began performing his poetry as part of this Parlando Project in 2018. Today’s piece, though late in my month-long series on this pioneer American Black poet, comes around to where I first encountered Johnson: as a Modernist, free-verse poet.

The previous posts this month are from two book-length collections Johnson published in 1913 and 1915. While it’s only speculation, it’s not uncommon for poets to collect work done over a few years, particularly for a first book. Accounts I’ve read say Johnson wrote poetry (and at least one locally produced play) while a student, so it’s plausible that some of the poems included in his poetry books could have been written even earlier in the century. English-language Modernist poetry started to be published around 1909. Within the next decade we see new forms begin to spread out based on concision, fresh imagery, unusual or prismatic scene-focus, and freer and non-regular rhyme and meter. Americans are conspicuous in this new movement. In 1912 Ezra Pound published his famous ultra-short poem “In a Station of the Metro.”   Living overseas, Pound starts promoting the new style as the foreign editor for the new Poetry  magazine, and he submits to them short poems by Hilda Doolittle (freshly renamed as H. D.)  In 1913 Pound and F. S. Flint compile “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”  which was published as a manifesto of the new style in Poetry. The next year Midwesterners Carl Sandburg started publishing the new free-verse style in Chicago and Edgar Lee Masters placed his initial Spoon River epitaph poems in Reedy’s Mirror out of St. Louis. In 1915, T. S. Eliot, another American ex-pat, publishes Prufock, and in New York a young poet Alfred Kreymborg gathers his friends to start a small literary magazine explicitly dedicated to the new forms. He titles it, in honor of the insurgent outsiders, “Others.” These others included William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Man Ray, Mina Loy, Orrick Johns, and Lola Ridge, all of whom were U.S. East Coast based. Also in Others:  Pound, Sandburg, and Eliot — and eventually, our Black man from Chicago, Fenton Johnson.

If Fenton Johnson is lesser-known, it’s possible he’d be on an even greater level of historical obscurity if he hadn’t been published in Others.  Sitting here in 2024, I can retroactively maintain that some poems from Johnson’s books of 1913 and 1915 are proto-Modernist through using Afro-American oral and musical forms, even though the bulk of his books are like the poems I shared early this month: poems in 19^th century forms.* From what I can see, Johnson’s work came to the attention of New York based Afro-American focused cultural critics and anthologists not because of those two book collections, but because of how strikingly different this 1919 free-verse little-magazine published poetry was, and the visibility of the cutting-edge Others  to NYC-based critics. When James Weldon Johnson created his first-of-its-kind collection The Book Of American Negro Poetry  in 1922 he included several poems by Fenton Johnson — but instead of the paragraph or two praising their strengths offered for many of the poets in his introduction, he says only this: “Fenton Johnson is a young poet of the ultra-modern school who gives promise of greater work than he has yet done.**” I read that hands-off briefness as meaning “Well, he’s doing something different, some are noting that, so I include him.” Despite that lack of enthusiasm by this early Black anthologist, one of the included poems, “Tired,”  has become Fenton Johnson’s most anthologized poem — the one that to this day is included in many Afro-American poetry anthologies. Besides being an early Afro-American to write in free verse, “Tired’s” prominence and Johnson’s mysteriousness has also given Johnson the air of a fierce political radical. In the next post in this series, I’ll tell you what I’ve found out about that.

Since it’s such a striking poem, and because “Tired’s”  free verse has become the predominant literary poetic style as the century progressed, that mode of Johnson’s poetry remains fixed in cultural memory to represent him. You can view a “lyric video” of my musical performance of “Tired”  at this link.  All of Johnson’s 1919 Others  poems (eight in total) are also in free verse, and today I’ll present two of them combined in one performance: short poetic portraits of a pair of older Black women that would be invisible to the society and the culture. “Others” indeed.

Here’s how the two poems appeared in the February 1919 issue of Others

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This time my accompanying ensemble is a rock quintet. You can hear it with the audio player gadget likely available below. No player? This highlighted link is a backup, and if you click it, it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Other Afro-American poets retained traditional metrical-syllabic and rhyming prosody used by Johnson’s original model Paul Laurence Dunbar. Jamaican Claude McKay who moved to the US after WWI published excellent formal verse, as did the younger poet Countee Cullen. Other less-remembered Black poets of this WWI through the 1920’s era worked largely in the older, established prosody. Just as Fenton Johnson was early in adapting Afro-American preaching and musical styles into his poetry, his early use of free verse predates the Harlem Renaissance.

**In a later 1931 edition there are apparently more extensive remarks by Johnson on Johnson, but I have yet to find anything other than excerpted quotes — but from those excerpts it seems James Weldon Johnson was troubled by what he saw as radicalism and despair in Fenton Johnson’s poetry.