Sam’s
World
1935-2018
When
I met Sam Cornish he was editing a little magazine called Mimeo and stocking shelves at the
Paperback Booksmith in Harvard Square. I had sent him some poems, which he
accepted but never published because the magazine folded. A few months later, he
left Boston to work at the Child Development Center in Washington, where he
befriended Maxine Kumin and Jay Wright. After a year he returned to work in the
CDC Boston-area office, devising eccentric but compelling teaching materials.
One afternoon we met at a bar in Park Square. He grilled me about Boston bars,
especially those in Southie and the Town. Could he safely drink there? What
would tough Irish working men say to a black man in a bar on East Broadway? It
took a while for me to realize that these were teasing questions, probing to
see if I believed he would actually go to a place like Whitey Bulger’s bar. But
if he wouldn’t, it wasn’t because he was black—black faces showed up in those
bars without incident—but because he was Sam Cornish, a singularity not a
stereotype, and chose his bars using an algorithm I‘d never figure out.
Sam
loved movies. Not film or cinema, but movies. Hollywood westerns, Alfred
Hitchcock’s American films, anything with an Elmer Bernstein or Bernard Herrmann
score, anything starring John Wayne. He loved comics as well, and amassed huge
stacks of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman,
Green Lantern, and other titles of that ilk. His favorite novels were James
T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, followed closely by Richard Wright’s Native Son. As a poet he learned from
William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes. He wrote about Bigger Thomas,
jazzmen, Harriet Tubman, and people, stories, and street scenes from his
childhood in Baltimore’s grim black neighborhoods. At the Enos Pratt Free
Library he edited a magazine of children’s writing named Chicory, after that favorite urban weed with its startling blue
flowers erupting in vacant lots. As a peripatetic teacher and later as Boston’s
first poet laureate he brought an earthy wit to elementary and high-school
classrooms all over the city and beyond. Teaching at Emerson College, directing
the Literature program of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, working at New
England Mobile Bookfair on weekends, he was a fixture on the literary scene. No
one who met him would forget him, or confuse him with anyone else.
Although
he embodied the black urban experience, he resisted the role of angry black
man. Despite repeated offers, he refused to publish with Broadside Press or
Third World Press. Generations, his
first major collection, appeared with Beacon Press in 1970. It sported an
introduction by Ruth Whitman rather than by someone from the Black Arts
Movement. Some of Sam’s colleagues were unhappy about this; but pleasing others
by conforming to their expectations was never Sam’s way. Yet some of his poems
are among the most uncompromising, most militant work of the last half-century.
What could be more to the point than his eponymous poem about Ray Charles?
Do you
dig ray
charles
when the
blues are
silent
in his throat
& he rolls
up his
sleeves
This challenge to the white embrace
of black music asks whether we can appreciate the pain of being a black
performer in a white world. It is not about “cultural appropriation”—Sam knew
full well that culture necessarily appropriates culture all the time—but about
facing up to this one suffering person, feeling how his music expresses him not
as an abstraction but as a black man struggling to live in his skin, resorting
to heroin to assuage a sad impossible hurt no white person can fully grasp. Sam
chose to publish with a white publisher because he wanted to confront a white
audience with poems like this. African Americans didn’t need Sam to tell them
who they were or what their lives were like.
For
some years Sam and I lived near each other in Cambridge—Sam on Broadway, and me
around the corner on Harvard Street. We worked together on Poetry in the
Schools assignments, driving out to high schools in Newton or Sudbury or taking
the T to elementary schools in Roxbury, Dorchester, Roslindale, Jamaica Plain.
A couple of times a week Sam would dish up one of his notorious dinners:
spaghetti with his peculiar sauce. He would mix tomato sauce and bourbon, slice
hot dogs into it, spice it with the hottest peppers he could find, and
slow-cook the mess for hours. He invited all sorts of people to dinner,
including up-and-coming young poets like Tom Lux and John Yau, and visiting
celebrities like Leonard Bernstein, Amiri Baraka, and the Dalai Lama. Bernstein
was at Harvard delivering his 1973 Norton lectures, the Dalai Lama was staying
with mutual friends on Chauncy Street, and Baraka came to Cambridge to persuade
Sam to capitulate and publish a book with a—any—black publisher. Bernstein
competed with Sam’s raconteur-ship, the Dalai Lama ate several helpings of
atomic spaghetti, and Baraka went away dissatisfied but safely cushioned with
bourbon. Those of us who weren’t famous happily basked in Sam’s polite,
understated challenge to every authority figure he met.
In
1975 Sam married Florella Orowan, a music student who specialized in film
scores, and who would later become a graphic designer. The wedding happened in
my large, rent-controlled Harvard Street apartment. In honor of the event, I
painted the living room, polished the floors, and even cleaned the bathroom. A
day or two later, we all caught the train to New York and roamed the bookshops
together. We combed the Fourth Avenue booksellers, the Gotham, the Argosy, and
the Strand. We saw six or eight movies in seedy Times Square theaters including
a couple of porn flicks. That was Sam’s idea of a honeymoon. We all concurred.
After
Sam and Florella moved to Brighton and I married Carole and relocated to New
Hampshire we saw each other less often, but the spaghetti dinners continued.
Every other month or so Carole and I drove to Brighton for hours of gossip,
serious talk, and spaghetti. For a few years Sam and Florella ran Fiction,
Literature, and the Arts, a bookshop in the arcade at Coolidge Corner, Brookline.
They could just as well have run it from home. Their apartment was a solid mass
of books. Crowded shelves covered every wall. Piles of book slouched on the
floor. At Christmas Sam would lavish on us treasures unearthed from the back
room of their shop or, later, from the deepest recesses of New England Mobile
Book Fair.
On
a couple of occasions, I brought Sam to Keene State College, where I taught
creative writing and ran the reading series. Sam would visit classes, joshing
with the students, and would present his reading in an offhand manner that
still conveyed real seriousness. What did my students make of poems like “Empty
Doorways”?
Empty doorways come straight
at me
Faces growing in the windows,
quiet women hanging clothes in the
backyard,
indians are falling in the streets.
I hear Malcom X is dead;
they become white.
Sam’s poems hover on the edge of
suggestion. They make most poetry, including mine, seem impossibly garrulous. The
students stared as if someone had arrived from another planet, but then
invariably would ask me to bring him back. His poems and presence stuck with
them.
For
Sam’s sixtieth birthday, Carole organized a session on his work at the American
Literature Association Conference in Baltimore. One of the participants offered
a vivid account of Sam’s Baltimore days when he worked at the library and
devised evil alcohol-soaked meals for his co-workers. Another speaker failed to
show up, so I was recruited to ad lib a paper on Sam’s prosody. As Ruth Whitman
noted, Sam “was born with perfect pitch.” You can’t change a word, much less a
line break, in his best poems. However, since I didn’t have his books handy and
had to quote from memory, I probably mangled more than a little of that
perfection. Sam seemed a little uneasy about being back in Baltimore, but took
it all with good humor.
In
1998 Carole published a book with Cambridge University Press entitled Writing America Black. It contains a
chapter on Sam’s poetry. As usual with Sam, he had trouble processing this
academic exercise. On the one hand, he appreciated the attention to his poetry;
on the other hand, he was wary. Cambridge was an uncomfortably prestigious
press. Why would it want a book that discussed his work? The white world had
scarred him more than he openly admitted; I don’t think he ever dropped his
guard.
Sam
become Boston’s first poet laureate in 2008. I thought it a fine and most
appropriate honor for both Sam and the city, but I wonder what Mayor Menino
thought of poems like “Forecast,” the Afterword to Generations:
All will die
watch out for
the man with the soap
and the towels
Could this cosmic washroom
attendant be someone we know? As the poetry scene of the last decades of the
twentieth century fades from memory, Sam’s poetry still has something gruff,
direct, but subtle to tell us. We would do well to listen.
