Conversations with Michael S. Harper, edited by John Zheng and Michael Antonucci
Reviewed by Rishabh Kumar and Vivek Singh
There's a moment, decades into this book, where Michael S. Harper stops explaining himself and just says it plainly, "to survive as an artist in America is always an endurance contest, particularly if you are Black." By then you believe him as you've watched him prove it, interview after interview, for almost forty years. Conversations with Michael S. Harper, edited by John Zheng and Michael Antonucci, gathers fourteen of those conversations, from a wary young poet talking to John O'Brien in 1972 to the professor of Literary Arts at Brown University looking back in 2016, months before his death. What holds the book together isn't argument so much as accumulation, the same voice, tested against a new stranger every few years, circling the same handful of convictions until they harden into something like philosophy, that jazz is "not programmatic and not abstract" but a way of thinking, that history "is your own heartbeat," not a fact in a textbook, that a poem, done right, comes from "a human, intuitive feeling for the language" rather than a formula. Read straight through, it stops feeling like a reference book and starts feeling like something closer to a portrait sat for, session after session, over half a century, by a man the volume's own editors remember, as "a remarkable poet, an inspiring teacher and a kind human being."
In terms of structure, the book justifies its subtitle as a "conversation" rather than a mere document. The editors describe the interviews as "separated by three decades, these comments take their place among the interlocking discursive pathways" that together produce "a high-relief portrait of the poet," and the chronological arrangement bears this out. Recurring preoccupations, history, modality, myth, race, teaching, accumulate depth as Harper returns to them with different interlocutors across different decades, rather than repeating himself.
The opening interview, conducted by John O'Brien in 1972, sets the terms for much of what follows. O'Brien's headnote credits Harper with "complete mastery over the tools of his language" and locates his early poetry's power in its ability to draw on Black speech and jazz
structures. In the conversation itself, Harper immediately complicates a frequently quoted description of his verse as "rhythmic rather than metric," clarifying that his interest lies not in mimicking musical form but in cultivating "a human, intuitive feeling for the language." Asked about Coltrane's influence, Harper offers what becomes the book's central theoretical concept, modality. Jazz and blues, he explains, are "open-ended forms, not programmatic and not abstract," modal, not fixed. What he means by modal, he explains, is a way of hearing the world that assumes "man is basically spiritual" and that the universe is a "wholistic" whole rather than a fragmented. This means “the universe is not fragmented, that man has a place in it, that man is a reflection of the environment, and the environment is the reflection of man.” Thus, humanity, art, and environment reflect one another rather than standing apart. This idea is elaborated further in the 1973 Chapman interview ("modality is always about relationships... modality is always about unity"). Modality, in other words, is never simply a musical technique borrowed for poetry, it's a whole way of understanding experience, and Coltrane is its clearest example, not its source.
The four interviews from the 1980s, with James Randall, David Lloyd, James R. Keegan, and Reginald Martin, turn toward Harper's sense of vocation and responsibility. To Randall, he insists that a Black writer must develop the stamina to be "optimistic in attitude" while expecting the worst, treating race as "a metaphor and a challenge of assertion" rather than a limitation to escape. To Lloyd, Harper is blunt about the American relationship to the past, Americans, as he says, are simply "not very good historians," people whose sense of the past collapses into “topicality but not towards continuity." For Harper, as a poet, real history isn't something filed away and consulted at "the local libraries,” but something lived out in ordinary speech, in which “these events are reflected in the lives of the people who live there and utter these place names that are named for somebody else” without ever learning the story attached to them. The past, on this account, survives everywhere in language and geography and almost nowhere in memory, an inheritance nobody bothered to explain to the people still living inside it.
The 1990s interviews, with Charles H. Rowell, Edward Hirsch, and Michael Antonucci, deepen the volume's engagement with Harper's literary genealogy and his sometimes-unsparing critical judgments. To Hirsch, Harper distinguishes poetry's "own laws" from music's, framing his interest in improvisation as a way of keeping tradition alive rather than repeating it, and offers a candid, mixed assessment of Langston Hughes, whose work he found lacking in the "complexity" he himself pursued. To Antonucci, Harper describes his cultural touchstones, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Ralph Ellison, Coltrane, as "models, not to be copied, but to be instructed by," a formulation that neatly encapsulates his lifelong resistance to imitation.
The final four interviews, from 2003 to 2016, shift register. Graham Lock's two 2003 conversations dwell on Harper's editorial stewardship of Sterling Brown's Collected Poems and his early years in Los Angeles under Coltrane's influence. Sascha Feinstein's 2007 interview functions almost as a memoir, tracing Harper's path from Brooklyn through integration and segregation to his teaching career. Heather Treseler's 2009 interview, paired with her own warm personal essay about studying under Harper at Brown, revisits his difficult years at Iowa and extends the conversation into the Iraq War and contemporary racial politics. The book closes fittingly with the editors' own 2016 interview with Harper, conducted for a special journal issue that, poignantly, was published only after the poet's death that year.
