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Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets

James A. Emanuel

by KaaVonia Hinton

Other literary forms

James A. Emanuel’s first book was written in prose, not poetry. His book Langston Hughes (1967) was one of the first detailed studies of Hughes’s work. Unsatisfied with the scant critical attention given to black authors, Emanuel worked with Theodore L. Gross and edited Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America (1968), the first book of its kind in nearly thirty years. A few years later, in 1972, he collaborated on another book, How I Write Two, this time with MacKinlay Kantor and Lawrence Osgood. How I Write Two explores the writing processes of several black poets, including Emanuel, Sonia Sanchez, and Gwendolyn Brooks. He served as general editor of the Broadside Critics series from 1970 to 1975. He has written a memoir, The Force and the Reckoning (2001), complete with poems and photos. Many of Emanuel’s literary essays and book reviews appeared in books, periodicals, and journals.

Achievements

Although James A. Emanuel has been called one of the most overlooked poets of modern times, he has garnered some recognition as a critic. Arguably, his most notable achievement is the promotion of critical attention for black writers’ work. He received the John Hay Whitney Fellowship (1952, 1953) and the Saxton Memorial Fellowship (1964). In 1966, Emanuel developed the first course in African American poetry to be offered at City College of New York. He also ran for a position on the Mount Vernon, New York, school board, but was defeated. “For ’Mr. Dudley,’ a Black Spy” (from Black Man Abroad) describes the difficult experience. He was awarded two Fulbright scholarships, a professorship at the University of Grenoble in France from 1968 to 1969 and a professorship at the University of Warsaw in Poland from 1975 to 1976. Emanuel also received a Black American Literature Forum Special Distinction Award for poetry in 1978. In 1979, the American Biographical Institute named him among its Notable Americans. Emanuel invented the jazz-and-blues haiku during the 1990’s. The form combines elements of jazz, blues, and the Japanese haiku. For his invention, he received the Sidney Bechet Creative Award in 1996. In 2007, he was honored with the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement from Columbia University.

Biography

James Andrew Emanuel, the fifth of seven children, was born in Alliance, Nebraska, to Cora Ann Mance and Alfred A. Emanuel, a farmer and railroad worker. Early on, Emanuel’s parents instilled a love of language and narrative in him. He read widely, and by junior high school, he was writing detective stories and poetry. In 1939, he graduated high school and was named the class valedictorian. He took a job in Washington, D.C., as the confidential secretary to General Benjamin O. Davis, assistant inspector general of the War Department in the United States Army, and he later joined the United States Army, where he served as a staff sergeant with the Ninety-third Infantry Division in the Pacific. After World War II, he enrolled in Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a B.A. degree. In 1950, he married Mattie Etha Johnson, whom he met after moving to Chicago, where he had begun attending Northwestern University and working as a civilian chief in the preinduction section of the Army and Air Force Induction Station. The couple had one child, James, Jr., who committed suicide in 1983. The couple was divorced in 1974. After earning an M.A. in 1953, Emanuel moved to New York and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University. He earned the degree in 1962. Emanuel became an assistant professor at the City College of New York in 1962, where he would teach until 1984.

Emanuel’s early work was published in college journals, but in 1958, his work began to appear in periodicals such as The New York Times, Midwest Quarterly, and Freedomways. In 1967, Emanuel published a critical study of Hughes, and in 1968, he coedited an anthology of African American literature, Dark Symphony. His first book of poetry, a collection of previously published poems, The Treehouse, and Other Poems, was also published in 1968.

In October of 1968, Emanuel moved to Seyssins and taught at the University of Grenoble, where he served as a Fulbright professor of American literature for a year. While living in France, he began working on poems later printed in Panther Man. From 1970 to 1975, he worked as general editor of the Broadside Critics Series, which published books about black poets, including Countée Cullen, Claude McKay, and Phillis Wheatley.

Emanuel served as a visiting professor of American literature at the University of Toulouse (1971-1973, 1979-1981) and Fulbright professor of American literature at the University of Warsaw (1975-1976). After his retirement from the City University of New York, Emanuel began to travel and live in Europe. Emanuel is often excluded from major anthologies, but some of his works, correspondence, and other documents are at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. Additional manuscripts and documents are housed in the collection at the Jay B. Hubbell Center for American Literary Historiography at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Analysis

James A. Emanuel’s earlier poetry was largely influenced by English poets such as John Keats and William Shakespeare, but his relationship with Hughes and his close study of Hughes’s work also influenced him. Some of Emanuel’s poems contain vernacular, and many of them experiment with genres of music, including blues and jazz. Critics say his poems are precise and that he is adept at creating subtle phrases. Unlike the poems of many of the African American poets writing during the 1960’s, Emanuel’s poems rarely contain alternate spellings or innovative forms. Instead, his poems usually have rhymed quatrains and regular lines and stanzas. They are about youth, black experiences, war, manhood, and love.

The Treehouse, and Other Poems

Most of the poems in The Treehouse, and Other Poems were previously published in anthologies and periodicals, such as Phylon, The New York Times, and Negro Digest. The poems are traditional, but some reflect blues and jazz influence. Emanuel’s serious poems are often about African Americans who were killed because of racism. Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy who was tortured, murdered, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman, is coupled with the fairy river boy who swims forever. “Where Will Their Names Go Down?” remembers the unnamed who were subjected to similar hate crimes. “Fisherman” was inspired by time Emanual spent with his son. Other poems are about war, heroes, and the poetic process. Scholars suggest that The Treehouse, and Other Poems received little critical attention because the poems do not adhere to the militant, direct style of some of the African American poetry published during that time.

Panther Man

Dedicated to Emanuel’s City College of New York students, Panther Man, angry in tone, argues against racism in the United States. In the preface, Emanuel calls the volume “a reflection of personal, racially meaningful predicaments” compelled by “my feelings about the most abysmal evil in the modern world: American racism.” The tone is harsher and more militant than that of The Treehouse, and Other Poems. Most of the poems mark Emanuel’s distancing himself from the traditional poetic forms found in his earlier collection. The title poem is based on the 1969 slaying by Chicago police officers of Black Panthers Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, while “Whitey, Baby” criticizes systemic racism. Panther Man also contains tributes to African Americans, particularly poet Hughes and Muslim leader Malcolm X. “For the Fourth Grade, Prospect School: How I Became a Poet” and “Black Poet on the Firing Range” are about poets and how they compose, while “Fourteen” and “Sixteen, Yeah” are about youth.

Black Man Abroad

Black Man Abroad has four sections of poems arranged thematically: “The Toulouse Poems, Parts I and II,” “The Warsaw Experiment,” and “Occasionals.” Most of the poems are set in Toulouse or another city in Western Europe, and many of them are longer and more complex than poems in earlier collections. The poems reveal speakers tackling themes that appear across Emanuel’s oeuvre: childhood innocence, manhood, and racism. This volume includes the author’s first romantic love poems, poems inspired by Marie-France Passard, a travel guide and librarian he met while in Europe, including “For ’Mee’” and “Lovelook Back,” as well as poems about parental love. The speakers of the poems are often concerned with how the past affects the present. In some of the poems, such as “Didn’t Fall in Love,” the speaker refuses to allow himself to get involved in a new relationship because of past experiences. In “Goodbye No. 1,” the speaker is sad because he loses something he thought he had. “Ass on the Beach, in Spain” explores the power and lure of feminine beauty over that of men. “After the Poetry Reading, Black” describes audience members’ disappointment when Emanuel reads poems that do not seem to situate him as a black poet.

Whole Grain

A number of haiku, in addition to the haiku that serve as prefaces to each part of the collection, make up the 215 poems in Whole Grain, a collection of Emanuel’s work from 1958 to 1989. Other forms are represented as well, including sonnets (“For a Farmer” and “Sonnet for a Writer”), free verse (“Topless, Bottomless Bar, Manhattan”), and rhymed quatrains (“Experience” and “I Wish I Had a Red Balloon”). Organized by themes, the collection contains poems about love, sex, race, and youth. Many of the poems, such as “Treehouse,” “Whitey, Baby,” “Emmett Till,” and “Fisherman,” are favorites among Emanuel’s readers.

Jazz from the Haiku King

Jazz from the Haiku King, an innovative collection of various types of jazz-and-blues haiku, indicates how jazz, an African American form of music, and haiku, a Japanese form of poetry, can be complementary means of expression. “Dizzy Gillespie (News of His Death)” and “Duke Ellington” pay tribute to musicians, while “Farmer” explores the connection between a farmer and jazz. “Sleek Lizard Rhythms” describes the rhythm of jazz music. “Jackhammer,” “Ammunition,” and “Impressionist” speak directly to African Americans, asking them to liberate themselves and fight against injustice.

Bibliography

1 

Bloom, Harold. Modern Black American Poets and Dramatists. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Provides a biography of Emanuel and excerpts from book reviews and critical essays about his work. It also includes an excerpt from “The Task of the Negro Writer as Artist: A Symposium,” an essay Emanuel wrote explaining that all writers, regardless of race or ethnicity, must create work that is beautiful, powerful, and true.

2 

Emanuel, James A. “James A. Emanuel.” http://www .james-a-emanuel.com. The official Web site for Emanual contains a brief biography, a bibliography, and interviews with the author.

3 

Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993. The chapter titled “James Emanuel: A Poet in Exile” discusses Emanuel’s life in France, particularly how people, sights, and experiences in and around Paris inspired his creativity, leading him to write poems such as “Lovelook Back,” “Clothesline, Rue Marie,” and “For Alix, Who Is Three.”

4 

Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. The chapter titled “James Emanuel’s Jazz Haiku and African American Individualism” focuses on Jazz from the Haiku King. The author describes how Emanuel uses haiku to convey elements of the African American experience and explains how Emanuel’s work was influenced by other writers.

5 

Holdt, Marvin. Review of Black Man Abroad. Black American Literature Forum 13, no. 3 (Autumn, 1979): 79-85. Offers an extensive examination of the work and its message.

6 

Watson, Douglas. “James Andrew Emanuel.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Poets Since 1955, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris. Vol. 41. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 1985. Provides a well-developed biography and criticism of Emanuel’s work.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Hinton, KaaVonia. "James A. Emanuel." Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSPAM_10990169000126.
APA 7th
Hinton, K. (2011). James A. Emanuel. In R. M. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Hinton, KaaVonia. "James A. Emanuel." Edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.