Ardor for Amistad: New poetry collection conjures voices of slave ship rebels
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Kevin Young, author of "Ardency."
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Robert Hayden begins his classic poem "Middle Passage" listing the "bright, ironical names" of slave ships. Published in 1962, it tells the story of the 1839 slave revolt aboard the Amistad. The surviving Africans ended up in a Connecticut jail while waiting for the American courts to grant them freedom.
Mr. Hayden, one of the most influential African-American poets, said he wanted to write poems "like algebra, in which you were solving for X," meaning they should be a search -- for the writer and the reader -- for the unknown. In order to do that in a poem based on history, Mr. Hayden wove multiple voices with narrative and lyric passages.
When Kevin Young takes up the Amistad case in his seventh collection, "Ardency," he begins with a nod to Mr. Hayden by listing the names the Spanish slavers gave their passengers to conceal the fact that they were born in Africa.
The book's title refers to the fervency of the Amistad rebels' wish for freedom and the nautical term meaning the tendency of a ship's stern to lurch upward when sailing into the wind.
This makes it difficult to keep course, and Mr. Young could be referring to the fact that while the Mendi rebels forced the Amistad sailors to sail east toward Africa during the day, at night the sailors would use the stars to navigate the boat west.
At the time, the international slave trade was illegal, but you could purchase slaves who had been born into bondage.
Mr. Young is also "solving for X" by re-examining this familiar narrative through multiple formal lenses. He retells the story in epistolary poems, actual letters, ballads, a libretto and forms drawn from the black vernacular tradition, such as field hollers, gospel songs and storytelling.
Mr. Young, a professor of creative writing at Emory University, is known for structurally inventive projects such as "To Repel Ghost," an homage to painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Like his previous books, "Ardency" is meticulously researched. At 256 pages, it's a heavyweight compared to most contemporary poetry volumes.
The book begins in the voice of James Covey, a free black man who interpreted for the Amistad captives.
First Published February 13, 2011 12:00 am
