Gloria Oden Between Worlds: The Tie That Binds, Homage, and other poems

“If poets can be said to operate within a social context – we, the editors, must surely think they can – then no group of poets is so conscious of context as are black Americans” – Michael S. Harper & Anthony Walton

In their Introduction to Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (Little, Brown and Company, 1994), poets Harper and Walton write:

“Gloria Oden, who, forty years early, had exhibited some of the talents and ambitions of Rita Dove, … had been caught in a sort of no-man’s land between standard black practice at the time and the closed white literary world.” High praise, since Rita Dove (see Index), Pulitzer Prize winner and US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and included in their anthology, was already recognized as a major American poet of the twentieth century at the time Harper and Walton wrote the introduction.

A poet between worlds. Gloria Oden (1923-2011) is the author of four – or five – books of poetry: The Naked Frame  (Exposition Press, 1952), Resurrections (Olivant Press, 1978), The Tie That Binds (Olivant Press, 1980), Appearances (Saru Press International, 2003), and Homage (Irving Place Publishers, 2011) – the last volume a single narrative poem in six parts.

Looking at available information on her publishers, it seems that all of Oden’s books were largely self-published. At least no major mainstream publisher offered to publish a volume of her poetry.

It is not that Oden was without contact with the “white literary world” of the 1950s. In their intro, prior to reprinting three of her poems “by permission of the author,” Harper and Walton write: “… the poems of Gloria Oden are, at their best, acutely chiseled lyrics full of humor and sadness in the twentieth century tradition of Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, and Elisabeth Bishop.”

Three anthologies from the 1960s, edited by black poets – Arna Bontemps: American Negro Poetry (1963, revised 1974), Langston Hughes: New Negro Poets U.S.A. (1964), and Robert Hayden: Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets (1967) – print a handful of poems: A Private Letter to Brazil, The Map, “… As When Emotion Too Far Exceeds its Cause” – Elisabeth Bishop, Review from Staten Island, The Carousel (with an epigraph from a poem by Louise Bogan), that keep repeating themselves in anthologies. Surely poems Harper and Walton had in mind when they compared Gloria Oden to Rita Dove. All of them, and others like them, remain uncollected.

“To Make a Poet Black …” Ambivalent about being identified as a poet by gender, Gloria Oden at first signed her poems G.C. Oden. It was the older poet Marianne Moore, one of her mentors, who persuaded her to drop the initials and publish as Gloria Oden (or Gloria C. Oden). 

Neither did she want to be known as a ‘black’ or ‘Negro Poet’. In the 1920s Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen in the poem Yet do I Marvel had written: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing.” Could you be both? Which one was more important? Cullen himself wanted to be seen as a poet, not as a black poet. And so did Gloria Oden. 

Taking his title from Cullen’s poem, in 1939 J. Saunders Redding had published his critical survey, To Make a Poet Black. The first black professor of English at an ‘Ivy League’ university, he had been one of few reviewers who took notice of Oden’s first book, The Naked Frame when it was published in 1952. And in 1977 he interviewed Gloria Oden in her home in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Sharing a dislike for the militant and ‘black arts’ poetry of the 1960s and 70s, Redding and Oden acknowledged that sex and race do matter: “What happened to me and my parents and their parents because they were not white – or only partially – is part of the heritage upon which I draw.”

A Pulitzer Prize nomination. Gloria Oden was 29 years old when she self-published The Naked Frame: A Love Poem and Sonnets. Today almost forgotten, its 24 sonnets too rigid and unfree in their adherence to the form. It would be a quater of a century before Oden published another book.

Resurrections (1978) is a book of 49 poems of remembrance, reminiscence – and loss. In August 1974, Gloria Oden’s mother, aged 87, and her oldest sister, aged 65, were murdered in their home in Washington, D.C., a crime that has remained unsolved and without apparent motive. An incident that prompted Oden to write again and look back at family – she had three sisters and two brothers – and a childhood spent in her father’s African Methodist Episcopal church in Yonkers, New York.

With Resurrections Gloria Oden at fifty-five had found a voice of her own. Yet, despite being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in literature in 1979, it has been out of print for years and years.

Appearances, with its cover “graced by a nude photograph of a svelte female torso,” as Julia A. Galbus writes in her fine Beltway Poetry Quarterly review headlined: “Smoke in a House on Fire: A Profile of Gloria Oden” – referring to Oden at the age of eighty “finding herself in love with a mysterious, distant younger man” – is the longest and most diverse of Oden’s books of poetry.

Poet of the black church. This summer, 44 years after it was published in 1980, I finally found a fine, affordable copy of Gloria Oden’s The Tie That Binds on the internet. (The seller included a reprint of Redding’s interview with Oden, mentioned above, published by Olivant Press in 1978).

Oden had not finished with writing about a childhood growing up in her father’s AME church during the Depression of the 1930s, her father “Minister to a needful congregation depressed long before 1929.” A small book-length poem, it is divided in eight parts: a prologue and seven poems, one for each day of the week, describing in loving detail the religious and secular life of the church.

In the prologue Oden writes: “Father was a hard man, glacial in his clergyman’s collar … However brief their acquaintance with/ my Father, none would be surprised/ to hear me say that although dead/ – buried 25 years – still/ Father monitors me as when/ flesh on bone he was ever watchful.”

But she would also note his devotion to duty: “Father – baptizing, marrying, burying;/ appearing at hospitals, jails, courts;/ easing the terror, grief of families,/ for less than $ 300 a year/ – sometimes never fully paid – / without limit poured himself/ into the service of church and community.”

Homage. In 2011, Homage was published as a limited-edition chapbook by Irving Place Publishers. It was reprinted in Beltway Poetry Quarterly’s The Resurrection Issue, Volume 14:3, 2013.

Gloria Oden describes her poem as “a rumination on early families of the first decade of the twentieth century who, following in the hopes of their forbears, labored to have their children enjoy the rights and privileges of this new Jerusalem, the United States.” The first of its six parts reads:  

“Viewed from above, automobiles, lying/ side by side, beneath mantles of snow,/ replicate like oven-ready loaves/ of bread, strangely anonymous, all/ the same, engineered distinctions lost  

Dead, we too, lose badges of earthly reality/ measure but, unlike machines, possess/ the favor of immortality./ Quickened, will we find mankind has learned/ to live, at last, in brotherhood and peace?” It is a poem in which Oden will return to her “church-centered youth.”

Published when she was 88 years old, Homage is one of the finest poems Oden ever wrote.

“Black to the bone.” Despite their objections to be known as “Negro poets,” it is impossible to see Countee Cullen’s Yet Do I Marvel, editor of Kaleidoscope Robert Hayden’s Middle Passage, or Gloria Oden’s The Tie That Binds as anything but ‘black to the bone,” to borrow a phrase from Kevin Young’s anthology from 2020, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, that reprints three of Gloria Oden’s poems (including Man White, Brown Girl and All That Jazz from Arnold Adoff’s 1973 anthology, The Poetry of Black America).      

To be black is also always to be ‘beyond’ black, to be about American history, America’s identity as a nation, American culture and other contexts, and about all that literature is also always about.

DESCRIBED IN Beltway Quarterly Review by Julia A. Galbus as “a modern Renaissance women,” Gloria Oden was never a full-time poet, even as she wrote poetry all her life. She had a law degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C., yet never practiced law. Editor of a journal of physics and math and science textbooks, around 1971 she joined the faculty at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, where she taught as a professor of English until her retirement in 1996.  

In an autobiographical essay, Memory Speak!, written sometime after 2003, Oden wrote: “I am sure but if you realize how today young poets know each other, have opportunities to publish each other, move themselves forward in the literary world, you see how much of a hit and miss it was for me.”