Everett Hoagland: The Music: New and Selected Poems, 1973-2023 (Willow Books, 2023)

There is something noble in the poetic voice of this first New Bedford Poet Laureate (1994-98) and professor emeritus of nearby University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he taught for thirty years until his retirement in 2003. I use the word noble as defined by the online Oxford Languages dictionary, meaning of ‘high moral principles’ or ‘having or showing fine personal qualities’. This is important to me in ways I will return to and explain toward the end of this article.  

Three years ago, in 2022 Everett Hoagland had self-published a volume of contemplative poems, The Ways, written – or assembled – during the covid-19 pandemic. I had begun a Random Notes article tentatively titled Poems of Affirmation, Remembrance, Reflection, Wonder – and Struggle; or, The Many Ways of Everett Hoagland, playing with Hoagland’s original sub/title and adding ‘struggle’ to the mix, to take a look at all eight volumes of Hoagland’s poetry beginning with Black Velvet (Broadside Press, 1970), omitting only Ten Poems (see the list of books/chapbooks below).  

But the publication of The Music: New and Selected Poems, 1973-2023 in the Willow Books Master Series made me change the title and the focus of this article. This new book is a much enlarged edition of Hoagland’s The Music and Other Selected Poems (North Star Nova Press, 2015), with 51 (vs. 31) poems, adding a dozen poems written over the last eight, eventful years. 

Putting New Bedford on the map. The town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, is situated on the east coast where the Acushnet River joins Buzzards Bay, about sixty miles south of Boston.

Two American authors have put New Bedford on the literary map. One is Herman Melville (1819-1891). His American classic Moby-Dick (1851), based on “the author’s own personal experience … as a harpooner” on the whale-ship Acushnet ten years earlier, is the symbolic story of the search for the giant white sperm whale. It begins with the sailor/narrator Ishmael (“Call me Ishmael”) signing on a whaler in New Bedford, at mid-century “the whaling capital of the world.”

The other one is Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, first published in the spring of 1845 by the   Boston Anti-Slavery Society. In chapter XI Frederick Douglass – author, orator, abolitionist and the most famous African American of the 19th century – writes about his escape from slavery and working from 1838 to 1841 on the wharfs of New Bedford, a town founded by English Quakers.

A new beginning. A citizen of New Bedford since 1973, Everett Hoagland was born in 1942 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of Lincoln University, class of 1963, where he met the unofficial ‘poet laureate’ of Black America, Langston Hughes (class of 1929). Taking a look at some of Hoagland’s early poetry, Hughes made some suggestions on a poem that subsequently won a creative writing award at Lincoln, making Hoagland begin to think seriously of himself as a poet.  And in 1968 Lincoln University’s American Studies Institute published the chapbook Ten Poems.

In 1973 he graduated with an MA from Brown University, where the late poet Michael S. Harper was his thesis advisor. (“When’s the last time you read Moby Dick? It’s a labor of love” – Harper).

1973 would mark a new beginning for Hoagland. With his MA from Brown, he moved to New Bedford, and that same year he began a thirty-year career as a teacher at UMass Dartmouth. So it is fitting that 1973 also marks the beginning of the fifty years of poetry collected in this 2023 edition of New and Selected Poems. (Hoagland has never reprinted poems from Black Velvet, his 1970 chapbook of erotic love poems, in later volumes. It is not that he has abandoned love poetry, see Love Jam (or Jamming) that also features the baritone sax of Bob Green, and Communion).  

Notes on American history. Scrimshaw is the name of a folk art, whalers on voyages that might take as long as four years carving decorations or images like that of a square-rigged whaleship on sperm whale bone or teeth. It is also the name of the1976 chapbook Scrimshaw: A Celebration of the American Bicentennial, beginning Hoagland’s serious engagement with (African) American history in poems like Parting Ways (SS, TC) and Paul Cuffe: Indian Blood (SS, TC).*      

Parting Ways: Notes and Thoughts at Parting Ways Cemetery is Hoagland’s meditations on American freedom after visiting the cemetery in 1976: ”Here Lie The Graves of Four Negro Slaves – / Quamany  – Prince – Plato – Cato – / These men fought in the Revolutionary War/ and were freed at its close.” Fighting for American independence, freed, but unable to vote.

Paul Cuffe (1759-1817), a mixed Akan (Ghanaian) and Wampanoag (Native American) Quaker, abolitionist, whaler, and shipbuilder, was a successful entrepreneur doing “a long dance with the Yankee dollar”. Using his own money and his brig Traveler, in 1815 he transported 38 free Blacks back to Africa. He helped secure the right to vote for tax-paying Black males in Massachusetts.

IT WOULD BE almost a quarter of a century before Hoagland published a new book of poems. This City (i.e. New Bedford) came out in 1999. He was sixty when he published … Here … New and Selected Poems in 2002. It will come as no surprise, then, that they contain many of his best poems, several not reprinted in The Music: At The Hurricane Barrier (TC), Lest We Forget (TC, Here), Big Zeb Johnson: “Mother’s father …from whom I get my six-four size,” and diabetes  (Here), nature poems: At the Access and The Moose: First Sighting (both Here), and others.

BAM/Black Arts Movement. But we must turn now to the book at hand: The Music: New and Selected Poems, 1973-2023. Everett Hoagland grew up as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s as part of BAM, the Black Arts Movement, and the struggle for civil rights and black power – see the grand and majestic poem A Big B.A.M. Theory of Creation (JW), excerpted here as Neo-Griot Rap.

The early poem On Johnny Cake Hill: A Sonic Vision turns an everyday occurrence to a ‘sonic vision’: A car using fluid containing sperm whale oil for automatic transmission breaks down near the New Bedford Whaling Museum; while the owner brags about a “smooth transmission,” Hoagland hears only “a whale’s song … the desperate sonar of an endangered/ species.” 

Originally titled The Music, the poem After Reading All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (a pseudonym) celebrates the remarkable story of the struggle and survival of Alabama farmer Ned Cobb (1885-1973) in the ‘Deep South’. Illiterate, Cobb proved to be a gifted storyteller with an “archival” memory. Theodore Rosengarten’s book, based on four years of interviews beginning in 1969 and told in Ned Cobb’s own voice, would go on to win a National Book Award in 1974. 

The Last Scottsboro “Boy” commemorates Clarence Norris. The last living of the nine Black boys falsely accused of the rape of two white girls and – with the exception of the youngest, a 13-year-old teenager – sentenced to death in Alabama, 1931, in what is probably the most infamous and long lasting case of legal injustice in the Jim Crow South, Clarence Norris was finally pardoned at age 63: “I have no hate;/  I like all people,/ … I wish those other boys were around to/ see.”

Just Words: Fredrick Douglass, 1838 (for longer versions see TC and JW) and Hammer Man: Lewis Temple, 1848, a formerly enslaved blacksmith, inventor of “Temple’s Toggle,” a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry, continues Hoagland’s engagement with American history, as do On Free Will and the Rights of Man on Thomas Jefferson and “dusky” Sally Hemmnings. 

In Red, White, and Blues Country a veteran ‘Blood’ goes to pieces in The Rainbow Grill, a white bar with a country box. “Greenie? He was/ a four-tour Beret./ Hell, he’ll be o.k.”  

Homecoming. In July/August 2004 UUWorld, a magazine published by the Boston-based Unitarian Universalist Association, published Homecoming: A sequence of poems about Africa. Seven poems that first appeared in … Here … in 2002, a result of two trips to Africa two decades apart: At East/West Beaches*, Nia, Umoja, Homecoming, Good Bloods and Bad Water*, Gorée*, and The Seven Days (The Return). (UUWorld have since published other poems by Hoagland).                                              

The beautifully designed booklet Homecoming (2014) reprints five of these poems, adding Home to Ghana and an excerpt from As I Ebb Toward the End of Life to the Africa sequence.

In 1978 Hoagland took his wife and infant daughter Nia on a jumbo jet and flew to Senegal, to Dakar, “The Paris of Africa,” and the capital of Negritude, to look for his roots on Île de Gorée with its slave barracoons and dungeons – for more than 300 years a center for the Transatlantic Slave Trade – among Wolof musicians, blind and crippled beggars, hungry hustlers (“Eighty percent of each dollar spent … on a ROOTS t-shirt goes to France”), and African-American tourists.

Homecoming takes Everett Hoagland to Ghana, to the Pan African Writers’ Association World Poetry Festival at the University of Ghana in Legon, November 1999: “we who are/ american made who/ feel and act like we are/ making it in america /…”. The 2012 poem, As I Ebb Towards The End of Life, one of my  favorites since I first read it in Ocean Voices, brings us to Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, the east shore of the Middle Passage, the salt water hyphen between African and American. With Gorée and Homecoming major poems in this deeply felt Africa cycle.  

Black Lives Matter. In Many Thousands Thousand Gone Everett Hoagland commemorates the thousands of Black lives lost during four centuries of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: in Africa on the coastward trek in coffles, in barracoons like Gorée, and in the suffocating hold of slave ships like Gracia De Dios during The Middle Passage to the Americas; during slavery and in the Jim Crow era of white supremacy in the American South; to the recent police killings of young Blacks.

Black Lives Matter! Hoagland will agree with poet Terrance Hayes when he writes in To Float in the Space Between (2018): “Those who retort “All Lives Matter” seem to hear the assertion, “Black Lives Matter more than other lives.” I hear it as, “Black Lives Matter as much as other lives.”   

It is just that Black lives are more at risk. In Echoes, an uncollected poem from 2017, Hoagland writes: “When I hear white liberals wry/ New-Yorker-cartoon-captions-like repartee,/ chuckles about how bad, absurd, fascist things are these days,/ even when that goes down/ between two glib NPR talk show hosts,/ I dig it’s laughing-to-keep-from-crying blues/ humor. But it is also the sound of them/ knowing, relatively speaking,/ they and theirs will still be okay./ … / even with the state of things in Amerikkka right/ now, they know: no uniformed cop, guard, soldier / is going to profile, stop-and-frisk, nor shoot and kill/ their kids and grandkids – just because/ they are white.”

The Music. On the front cover of both editions of The Music there is a photo of musician Benjamin Richard Hoagland, Everett Hoagland’s great-grandfather. And music is key to understanding the poet and the poetry of Hoagland who has worked seriously on the art of reading and performing his poetry before an audience, often selling his books at poetry readings. (A recent photo shows him reading from The Ways in the reading room of the New Bedford Free Public Library).   

In his Introduction to the 2023 edition of The Music, Hoagland writes: “I suspect many of us who are African American poets would really prefer to be masterful musicians. Maybe that is why so much black poetry … is so downright musical.” And many of Hoagland’s best poems celebrate or eulogize jazz musicians and jazz poets: Kinda Blue: Miles Davis Died Today, Bob Kaufman? (“No. I did not know him./ But here, in old New Bedford  …”), and All That: Fred Ho, on California born, multi-talented composer, baritone sax and political activist, the late Chinese-American Fred Ho who from a young age identified with the civil rights struggle and drew on both jazz and his Chinese heritage in his music – a poem that is as many-faceted: “All That,” as Fred Ho’s life. 

I love Sister Say, Hoagland’s witty yet tender praise-song for Sonia Sanchez, a fellow poet from the Black Arts Movement days. Amiri’s Last Set: Symphony Hall, Newark, NJ, Jan. 17, 2014, is the last poem in The Music, his friend Amiri Baraka – along with Langston Hughes – an early influence on Hoagland as a poet and activist: “We’ll be together again/ at the protests, rallies,/  meetings …”

The struggle and the song. The Music: New and Selected Poems, 1973-2023 is Everett Hoagland’s best book since … Here … from 2002. Among his many honors and awards let us mention a 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from the NAACP Boston Branch, the 2023 American Book Award (for The Ways), and – perhaps most important to Hoagland – the 2015 Langston Hughes Society Award. On the back covers alone there is praise from Martín Espada, poet and professor at UMass Amherst, Samuel Allen, Clarence Major, devorah major, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.

Lest we forget. Everett Hoagland is a poet with a long memory, his poems a celebration of 250 years of African American struggle and song. As I am finishing this article, we see a backlash that is ripping apart the America that I have known for the first 81 years of my life. We need people who will look honestly at America’s past and present, poets like Hoagland whom the U.S. Inaugural Poet 1993 Maya Angelou once described as “someone who cares and someone who comprehends.”

*I add information (SS,TC) on where to find only those poems by Everett Hoagland that are not (re)printed in the 2023 edition of The Music – see list of books and chapbooks below.

UFI // 10 January 2025   

Books and chapbooks of poetry by Everett Hoagland:

Black Velvet (Broadside Press, 1970 – 17 poems) / BV

Scrimshaw, A Celebration of the American Bicentennial (The Patmos Press, 1976 – 16 poems) / SS

This City and Other Poems (Spinner Publications, 1999 – 21 poems) / TC

… Here … New and Selected Poems (Leapfrog Press, 2002 – 42 poems) / Here

Just Words?  (North Star Nova Press, 2007/08 – 27 poems) / JW

Homecoming (North Star Nova/Trilingual Press, 2014 – 9 poems) / HC

The Music and Other Selected Poems (North Star Nova Press, 2015 – 31 poems) / TM 15

The Ways: Poems of Affirmation, Remembrance, Reflection and Wonder (North Star Nova Press, 2022 – 34 poems) / TW

The Music: New and Selected Poems, 1973-2023 (Willow Books, 2023 – 51 poems) / TM 23

A chapbook, Ten Poems, was published by Lincoln University’s American Studies Institute in 1968.

Edited by Everett Hoagland:

Ocean Voices: An Anthology of Ocean Poems (Spinner Publications, 2013 – 54 poems) / OV