Helene Johnson

Helene Johnson (born July 7, 1906 in Boston , † July 8, 1995 in New York ; also Helen Johnson ) was an American poet of the Harlem Renaissance .

Life

Helene Johnson was the only child of a single mother Ella Benson Johnson, a domestic worker in Cambridge in Massachusetts born in Boston. She never met her father, George Johnson. Both parents were from the southern states , the mother from Camden, South Carolina , the father from Nashville , Tennessee . In addition, her mother was herself a descendant of African American slaves . George Johnson was said to be from Greece and lived in Chicago . The parents separated shortly after the birth.

Helene was raised in part by her maternal aunts on Brookline Street in Boston and Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard , a neighborhood where mostly blacks lived. She spent her childhood with her aunts, her mother and her cousin, the novelist Dorothy West . After graduating from Boston Girls' Latin School, she briefly attended Boston University .

In 1925, she won a Boston Chronicle short story competition and published her first poem, Trees of Night, in Opportunity magazine . In the months that followed, her poems appeared repeatedly in various magazines, giving young black authors the opportunity to publish that they would otherwise not have got. In winter 1926/27 she went along with her cousin Dorothy West to New York City to attend the Columbia University to study journalism.

A few months later she sold a poem to Vanity Fair magazine and became famous in the Harlem art scene. The two cousins ​​soon became close friends with Zora Neale Hurston , whose apartment they took over after they moved. Johnson was considered one of the most promising young writers in Harlem in the opinion of the critical scene. She had been noticed by critics in early 1925 when her award-winning poems appeared in Opportunity , and she was also a member of the Saturday Evening Quill Club in Boston. As a judge at the Opportunity Competition, Robert Frost ruled that he had never read a better poem than The Road to be judged.

Her work has also appeared in Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1926 and in the only issue of Fire !! (1926), in The Messenger and a special edition of Palms edited by Countée Cullen . Johnson was also a close friend of Wallace Thurman , editor of the short-lived literary magazine Fire! , who however let it live on as a template for the character of Hazel Jamison in his iconoclastic satirical novel Infants of the Spring (1932).

Johnson reached the peak of her work in May 1927, when her poem Bottled , a work with the innovative use of street jargon and an unorthodox rhythm, was published in the Vanity Fair . These were amazing accomplishments for a young African American lyricist experimenting with erotic themes and urban slang . For understandable reasons, women writers mostly avoided these fields in the 1920s. Johnson was the exception alongside Anne Spencer , Jessie Fauset , Effie Lee Newsome , Gwendolyn Bennett and the lesser-known Gladys Casely-Hayford .

Her best everyday language poems were probably Bottled , Poem, and Regalia . Eight of her works appeared in Cullen's influential anthology Caroling Dusk (1927). In addition, her works were published in James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1931. When the Harlem Renaissance era ended in 1929, Johnson changed her life and hardly wrote any more. From 1934, Dorothy West published the literary magazine Challenge from Boston , in which Johnson published twice more until 1935.

In 1933 she married William Warner Hubbell III, a shipyard worker with whom she had a daughter born in 1940. Her husband encouraged her to keep writing purposefully, but she avoided it. She later divorced and moved to Greenwich . Only in 1987 did she allow her daughter Abigail McGrath to contact the literary scene again in response to a canceled reading at which she was supposed to accompany Harry Belafonte's daughter Gina Belafonte by correspondence . Always extremely shy, she also declined an invitation to a public reading at the New York City Off Center Theater.

It wasn't until an interview with her cousin West the following year that more attention was drawn to her life. The reason for her literary silence towards the public she justified in an interview in 1992 with the fact that as a child of poor people she became known too quickly and ultimately could not earn a living by writing poetry. For years she worked for the city administration and as a correspondent for the Consumers Union in Mount Vernon , where one of her colleagues was Gwendolyn Bennett. However, the influence of the global economic crisis at the end of the 1920s should not be underestimated, which for pecuniary reasons scattered many black intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance across the United States on the one hand and forced them into other professions on the other, as the publishers saw no future for their topics .

Yet, according to her daughter, she continued to write almost every day for the fun of it, often tearing up or at least rewriting the draft from the previous day, so that her biography This is Waiting for Love included at least thirteen unpublished poems that reflected her personal humor and Style preserved even into the 1970s. She returned to Massachusetts for a brief period in the 1980s, but her poor health led her to return to New York, where she lived near her daughter. Her daughter was also connected to the theater and owned the off-center theater in New York.

Helen Johnson died on July 8, 1995 in her Manhattan apartment . In her obituary, the New York Times referred to her as " the poet of Harlem".

plant

Helen Johnson's career lasted only a decade (1925–1935) and she published only 20–30 poems. After they were first published in magazines, some of them were repeatedly included in anthologies. While the considerations of nature were in the foreground in her poems, the themes have changed since her time in Harlem. In her poems she was a committed advocate for black rights and their cultural identity. In this way she also transformed negative stereotypes about black people into positive ones, into a reason for pride. A second main theme of her poetry remained the sensuality and beauty of nature. She often wrote in free rhythms and in a colloquial tone, but also composed sonnets such as B. Sonnett to a Negro in Harlem. 1927, in which she praised the physical beauty and the proud spirit of the African American:
"You are disdainful and magnificent -,
Your perfect body and your pompons gait
Your dark eyes flashing solemny with hate."

Poem, on the other hand, celebrated popular Afro-American culture or the zeitgeist of the 1920s embodied in jazz . Written in free verse in the language of the black population, the poem is addressed to the tap-dancing , banjo- playing "Jazz Prince" who inspired Johnson to write the poem in the first place on the stage of the Harlem Lafayette Theater. In addition, the language overcomes the distance between the listener and the performer:
"Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head
and the way you sing, and dance,
And everything"

literature

• William Drake: The first wave. Women poets in America, 1915-1945. Collier McMillan, London / New York 1987.
• Patricia Loggins Hill (Ed.): Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Hughton Mifflin Co., New York 1998.
• Nathan Irvin Huggins: Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press, New York 1976.
• Alain LeRoy Locke / Robert C. Hayden (Eds.): The new negro. Atheneum, New York 1976.
• David Levering Lewis (Ed.): The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Penguin Books, New York 1994.
• Verner D. Mitchell (Ed.): This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 2000.
• Carolyn Wedin Sylvander: Helene Johnson . In: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 51. Farminton Hills: Thomson Gale 1986 pp. 164-167.

Web links

• Rita Dove : Poet's Choice In: Washington Post . February 27, 2000. Retrieved March 8, 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eric Pace: Helene Johnson, Poet of Harlem, 89, Dies. In: New York Times . July 11, 1995. Retrieved March 7, 2012.
2. ↑ On childhood, literary fame and later marriage, as well as the full details of her poems: Maureen Honey: Shadowed dreams: women's poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick et al. a. 2006, pp. 178-199.
3. ↑ Venetria K. Patton, Maureen Honey (Ed.): Double-take: a revisionist Harlem Renaissance anthology. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick et al. a. P. 599ff.
4. ^ Barbara LJ Griffin: Helene Johnson (1906-1995). In: Emmanuel Sampath Nelson: African American authors, 1745–1945: bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport 2000, pp. 290-296.
5. ↑ On the interpretation and effect of the poem: Margo Nathalie Crawford: "Perhaps Buddha is a women". Women's Poetry in Harlem Renaissance In: George Hutchinson (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 126ff., Here p. 138.
6. ↑ Diane Cardwell: THE LIVES THEY LIVED: Dorothy West; Last leaf on the tree. In: New York Times . January 3, 1999. Retrieved March 9, 2012.
7. ^ Philip Bader: African-American Writers. Facts On File, New York 2004, p. 139.
8. ↑ See Gloria T. Hull: Color, Sex & Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1987.
9. ^ New York Times, February 2, 1987. Retrieved March 9, 2012.
10. ↑ Venetria K. Patton, Maureen Honey (Ed.): Double-take: a revisionist Harlem Renaissance anthology. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick et al. a. 2006, p. 599.
11. ^ Lois Brown: The encyclopedia of the Harlem literary renaissance. Facts On File, New York 2006, p. 288.
12. ↑ According to this information, there are still 30 poems in the archives that were written between 1972 and 1979 .
13. ↑ Quoted from: Philip Bader: African-American Writers. Facts On File, New York 2004, p. 140.
14. ↑ Verner D. Mitchell (Ed.): This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 2000, SX