Owen Dodson - 331 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Owen Dodson was a poet, writer, playwright, teacher and director. Being the son of a journalist, he was naturally inclined to write. He wrote poetry and plays from an early age. As a U.S. Navy enlistee during World War II, he wrote naval history plays for Black seamen, the verse chorale, a leading figure in the Black theatre. They included The Ballad of Dorie Miller and the poem “Black Mother, Praying,” a plea for racial integration. Dodson’s Black History Pageant New World A-Coming was performed at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1944.




Source - AAREG site


Powerful Long Ladder


In 1946 Dodson published Powerful Long Ladder, a collection of poetry whose power rested in its emotional style. A reviewer at Poetry, Jessica Nelson wrote;


“Every good Negro poet has a double allegiance…. He belongs to the great spiritual brotherhood of sensitive intellectuals and is more closely akin to them than to the downtrodden sharecroppers of the south; but he can not and should not forget that he is a Negro … he is privileged and articulate, he must speak for those who are not. Owen Dodson celebrates the wrongs of his special minority, not with bitterness but with sorrow.”

However, most critics found that Dodson's sense of emotion was too heavily inspired by his skin colour. Dodson’s writing of racism and powerlessness led to poor sales and professional obscurity.


Powerful Long Ladder is concerned with black people struggle, and goes back to the history and horrors of slavery,segregation and subsequent exploitation and racism.

The book, divided into five sections, takes its title from the Dodson poem “Someday We’re Gonna Tear Them Pillars Down,” a seven-page verse drama that uses dramatic verses. The pillars are symbolically akin to the wall in Robert Frost’s famous poem “Mending Wall”; they are barriers that serve as points of demarcation between people—in the Dodson poem, between African Americans and the dominant society.

Dodson has often been compared to Frost. Both were deep in their observances of human spirit. Although Dodson’s verse had an activist voice in them which spoke of inequities of segregation and discrimination. Whereas Frost had a philosophical detachment.

The first section of Powerful Long Ladder contains a dozen poems, mostly dialect poems. The poems have different objectives and voices. Some focus on individuals; others deal broadly with topics ranging from racial tension to death to the accomplishments of African Americans.

The first poem, “Lament,” which is not in dialect, is exceptionally interesting, beginning with an imperative to a dead boy to wake and tell how he died. What the poem essentially conveys is the hopelessness of trying fully to understand life’s common abstractions—love, freedom, terror, death.

A more complicated view of human existence emanates from “Guitar,” a ballad about a black jailed for hitting a white person. Society decrees that, without solid evidence, the black should be judged guilty. This poem has strong metrical overtones from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. The tone of the poem is one of despair tempered by resignation. The black man has no recourse as society is constituted.

Among the best-known Dodson poems is “Black Mother Praying,” a war poem about a mother whose sons have left to defend their country. She compares her sacrifice to Christ’s crucifixion, her sons to the son of Mary. The rub is that when her sons come home—if they come home—the freedom they fought to ensure will, because of their colour, extend neither to her nor to them. This poem is a precursor of Dodson’s The Confession Stone, in which Dodson makes the Virgin Mary and her son quite ordinary people dealing with the details of daily life. Mary admonishes the young Jesus not to play with Judas when he goes out.

The second section of Powerful Long Ladder contains a substantial excerpt from Dodson’s verse play, Divine Comedy, which is an ironic presentation of the kind of hope that the evangelist Father Divine offered his hapless followers, most of them black, for several decades. Dodson as a boy went to one of Father Divine’s meetings with his brother Kenneth and never forgot the experience. Like Jesus feeding the five thousand, Father Divine fed his followers. He drew milk from a seemingly bottomless well. When the crowd had dispersed, however, Kenneth lifted the tablecloth to find that a black boy was underneath pumping milk into the vat from which Father Divine magically extracted it.

Surely this experience provided an initial stimulus for Divine Comedy, which also has many structural elements borrowed from Dante’s masterpiece. Dodson’s verse drama provides, in essence, a startling insight into how black people, stripped of much of their hope, can be exploited and duped, as Father Divine’s followers usually were, even by their fellow black people.

The other sections of Powerful Long Ladder, “Poems for My Brother Kenneth,” “All This Review,” and “Counterpoint,” develop the racial themes that Dodson examines in the earlier sections. The latter sections, though, show a growing artistic maturity on the author’s part, particularly in the lyricism with which he approaches his material.



Source - Black poetry site