Customer Reviews

Run Toward Fear: New Poems and a Poet's Handbook (English and English Edition)

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Haki Madhubuti's book of poetry is a power packed punch for the reader and would-be writer. He addresses current events, history, family and celebrities. He has the ability to use the pages as a canvas to illustrate the raw emotions in life: love, loss, rage/anger, admiration, and admonition. Madhubuti allows the reader to peer inside his thoughts and wrap your self in his feelings.

I so enjoyed this book. The poems made me laugh, feel angry, and think about how I could affect change in my world. The poem "Fear" deals with the topical issues of the war in Iraq and corporate greed; "Legal Lottery" sheds a spot light on the farcical Kenneth Starr report; and "Missed Information" discussed the overly misuse of the word love. Many other poems were odes to family, artists, activists and other writers.

The Handbook for Poets is in section three of this book. Madhubuti offers aspiring poets 40 rules for composing prose. He encourages writers to, "Never give up on love, children, good poetry, writing, music, visual art, theatre, dance, books and the power of ART to transform and make progressively whole the most backward of people and those disguised as human beings." The author also includes and extensive list of poets he admires and considers to be experts in the art of writing prose: Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, Langston Hughes, Kalamu ya Salaam, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Clarence Major, and Quraysh Ali Lansana to name a few.

This is a must have in the book collection of aspiring poets and those who love weaving tapestries with words.

Haki R. Madhubuti has written some of the most important poetry of the last fifty years and he is without question one of the preeminent poets writing in America today.

This his eleventh book of poetry, Run Toward Fear: New Poems and A Poet's Handbook is divided into two main sections: a portion of new poems and, at the back, a handbook of advice for poets young and old. The first line of the first of the forty poems declares, "It is the poets who run toward fear." And the first of the forty enumerated aphorisms of advice in "The Poet's Handbook" at the back begins, "Learn to `run toward fear.'" It is a sentiment repeated throughout the book: "The highest mandate a poet has (other than writing the strongest poems that she or he is capable of) is to be in the vanguard with others in the pursuit of freedom and justice for all" (67).

This book is a commanding and potent statement of the redemptive power and political essence of art and love, and it contains more apothegmatic addresses to and imperative phrases for the reader than probably any other poetry book I've read. Its mode is instructive, pedagogic, unabashedly inspirational, palliative, and its tone is by turns avuncular, elegiac, lyric, fiery and plain spoken. Professor Madhubuti has not written a twee, aestheticist, elegant collection, but a work of nurturant pragmatic force.

Insofar as the entire book amounts to a manual of instruction about how to triumph, in art, spiritually, democratically, intellectually, and emotionally, residing continually in the local, in the face of systematic oppressive othering, the management of emotions (by judges, employers, police), the pervasive maintenance of economic, gender, racial and ethnic boundaries, regulated discourse, disenfranchisement from wider "whiter" corporate power networks, and the regular vicissitudes of mortal life - insofar as this book does this, and does it triumphantly, it is poetry of the highest kind. It is a poetry enthroned in history.

In "Why Shani?," a poem dedicated "For the Baraka Family" and remarking upon the murder of Amina and Amiri Baraka's youngest daughter, Shani Isis Makeda Jones Baraka, then 32, Madhubuti writes,

"to rise from unanswerable pain

requires a history beyond the acquisition of things,

demands work on the other side of self and self.

you have labored and researched the catalogs of the world

& refused to be separated from the poor and poorer.

your love is uncorrupted and contagious,

grounded in your arts, activism, and the familial.

we reciprocate." (21)

This is a poetry tightly rooted in the American pragmatist tradition stretching back through Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Dewey, William James, Emerson and beyond. In fact, this book -- insofar as it is, generically speaking, in great part essentially a handbook of conduct -- has roots that could be said to reach all the way back to the great pragmatist Stoic philosopher Epictetus, born a Greek slave, whose Enchiridion, which means manual or handbook, is a collection of pragmatic aphorisms for living one's life in the face of adversity.

In other words, Run Toward Fear is as much a book of poems as it is an ars vivendi. It is for this reason one of the most unusual and satisfying books of poetry I have ever read. These are poems whose pleasures derive from their utility: Twenty-two of the forty poems bear some italic text at the bottom explaining the purpose and occasion of the poem, e.g., "Remembering the children of Kosovo," or "For the teachers of poetry," or "For Margaret Walker Alexander, 1915-1998." This is a poetics embedded in the local in a way fundamentally contrary to aestheticism and its pretensions toward universal cultural value.

In his autobiography William Carlos Williams quotes John Dewey: "The local is the only universal, upon that all art builds." If the very existence of aestheticism is founded upon the dismissal of history and the local, then this book is the farthest thing from aestheticist as you can get. The school of quietude, so prevalent in American poetry since the rise of the New Criticism, has insisted that poetry (and poetry especially of all the genres) has no, and can have no, active political force in the world. Madhubuti works then in the radical political tradition of all great writers, not just great Black writers, when he declares, "The best poets find peace in themselves and work incessantly to find it in others, their surroundings, and on more than one occasion write poems about the necessity and possibility of a world at peace." (61) Note that he does not say the best poets satisfy aesthetic conventions: he says simply they find peace. A better standard for great writing cannot be found.

This book is then about finding peace through history, family, connection, and the genius that rises from them and must learn to run toward fear if it is to survive: the relations among real people are named on page after page, as in his tribute, "Our Daughter on Loan," an elegy for Kevani Zelpa Moyo, the daughter of Kimya and Kofi Moyo, dead at age 17:

[...]

your history was still in discovery

as grandmothers, big mommas and babas declared,

"you were on loan to us,"

not a borrowed book or pawn shop watch.

your visit among us is still mystery and melody,

"tweety" birds with rhythm in their eyes.

your mother is a southern river,

your father a strong stone with baggage,

your family is Black stories, deep crops,

gathering winds, Black hurricanes in waiting.

you were washed in love and possibilities,

sun bathed in smiles, tunes and cultural signatures.

why you leave us so soon?

For Kevani Zelpah Moyo

(1982-1999) (30)

I believe Haki Madhubuti would concur with Lynn Worsham, who, in her essay "Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion," declares "that if our commitment is to real individual and social change...then the work of decolonization must occur at the affective level, not only to reconstitute the emotional life of the individual but also, and more importantly, to reconstruct the feeling or mood that characterizes an age. To be sure, our most urgent political and pedagogical task remains the fundamental reeducation of emotion." I believe it is this very project that has tasked Madhubuti since his first book as Don L. Lee, Don't Cry, Scream. And he has chosen with this book to highlight a lesson that is relevant now and will remain so for as long as civility, love, and happiness are threatened by the violence of ignorant men and unjust structures: that unless those who make art, and those whom art makes, first realize the extent of their fear, and then act upon it and see it for what it is -- a tool wielded against us by "the bomb users, greed promoters, career politicians, corporate plastic makers, armies of money-makers, pleasure-over-principle advocates, proponents of artificial food" (67) -- we cannot be free. And poets are especially tasked, he says, for,

"The determined force of any age is the poem, old as

ideas and as lifegiving as active lovers. A part of any

answer is in the rhythm of the people; their heartbeat

comes urgently in two universal forms, music and poetry.

for the reader for the quiet seeker

for the many willing to sacrifice one syllable

mumblings and easy conclusions

poetry

can be the gigantic river

that allows one to recognize

in the circle of fire

the center of life." (56)

-- Gabriel Gudding (This review first appeared in AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW, 2004 or 2005 or so)