LeRoi Jones: Comic Nerd
1992: An always-yawning, perpetually kinky-haired sophomore in the English department at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, I’ve recently declared my major, English with a focus on creative writing. I’m searching for my poetic voice by casting about for a, well, compelling subject. What should my poems rhapsodize or mourn? What topic do I know enough about, at 19, to render as eloquently as Sylvia Plath or as epically as Homer, in verse?
With no car or job, I have nothing better to do than attend my classes: surveys and introductions and seminars on Old English. At day’s end, I eat something in the cafeteria, spray myself with DEET-laced Off!, then leave a campus that’s barely older than I am to tromp, clutching a Spanish-mossed oak branch, through the surrounding primeval swamps and cypress groves. I cross paths with alligators, raccoons, armadillos, cottonmouth snakes, and bobcats. Mosquitos, ticks, and horseflies plague me. During my daytime treks, the Space Shuttle occasionally glints like a sun-infused diamond in the blue Florida sky. The disc-golf course that leads to the quietly nesting anhinga just outside a housing development is an alien-constructed Stations of the Cross for me to gauntlet walk. I’m a lunatic, imagining myself a muck-encrusted monster hatched from a haywire science experiment and narrating aloud my adventures in the third person: He encounters the twisted burned-out shell of an old airboat, engulfed in lily pads.
But in the end, I never find in those murky wetlands what I’m looking for: my muse, my lyrical mojo.
All I have in my background up to this point is a series of hilarious, if precocious, music gigs: playing electric bass in a two-hour jazz performance at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, starring in high-school musical productions (Grease, West Side Story, Little Shop of Horrors), and singing for six years in the St. John’s Episcopal Choir of Men and Boys, an ensemble of freckled, blue-eyed, Anglo choristers into which I didn’t, let’s say, visually gel. Any place where white people gathered, I didn’t blend, primarily because I’m half-white, my mother being an Ybor City-spawned Latina. My father’s family warned him that his child would be labeled a “half-breed.” And so I am. Odd, particularly for an Episcopal choirboy. Still, I pushed my way through every door to get what I wanted, which was another gig, another show. I spent my adolescence rocking out in local churches, black-box theaters, dive bars, suburban garages. Sure, I did some menial work during summers, slinging popcorn and operating the projector at the AMC in Hyde Park Village near Bayshore Boulevard. And yes, at the dawn of the grunge era, I’m now writing album reviews (Flaming Lips, Jesus Jones) for the campus newspaper—twenty bucks a pop, plus a free CD from the record company. Otherwise, my life feels blank, vacuous. I’m confident that I have things to say, but a question persists: Around what weighty theme will I wrap my insights and wordplay?
I find the answer, gradually, in the pages of an out-of-print poetry collection jammed into a bookshelf in the creative-writing lounge. This is the storage room where literary journals and advance review copies of books are abandoned by professors who have secured tenure, thus have little need for them. Mostly dreck, but one intriguing book features a cover with the hard-staring eyes of the young Black poet named LeRoi Jones [1].
The title is gothic: The Dead Lecturer (Grove Press, 1964). I open the book, plop myself on a sofa of itchy fabric, and read the epigram[2]:
“In blackest day, In blackest night
No evil shall escape my sight!
Let those who worship evil’s might
Beware my power…
Green Lantern’s Light.”
I recognize that oath. It’s what the DC Comics superhero Green Lantern (a main character in the Hanna-Barbera animated series Super Friends [3]) intones when standing in front of his namesake lantern to recharge his magical ring.
I flip through the book and stumble into a landmine of a poem called “The Invention of Comics”[4]:
I am a soul in the world: in
the world of my soul the whirled
light / from the day
the sacked land
of my father.
How does this stanza relate to comic books, the invention of a medium that I’ve enjoyed since childhood? No mention of superheroes, spinner racks, or Stan Lee. Just clever homophony (world/whirled) and the intentional misuse of a forward slash to indicate a line break, severing the internal glow (of the soul) from external sunshine (of the day). My high-school literature teacher would be proud of my surface analysis. What’s the point, though? I look deeper.
In the world the sad
nature of
myself. In myself
nature is sad. Small
prints of the day. Its
small dull fires, like a greyness
smeared on the dark.
It barely requires a second read for these lines to convey the unhappy nature of existence, how nature evokes melancholy when all you see is ashen blandness, when inspiration’s flame glows dimly, a miserable ember. I get it: I mean, what else am I doing, but struggling against the grayness, lumbering into the swampland at dusk, color fading from the palmettos, as I rummage my past for a spark of ignition?
I’m inspired by this poem. The speaker understands the necessity of the ninvention of comics full of color, heroism, adventure, justice. When a passionless world whirls your spirit like a blender and makes mincemeat of your dreams, you crave the pure pleasure, the huge satisfaction, that a juicy comic book provides. The speaker goes on.
The day of my soul, is
the nature of that
place. It is a landscape. Seen
from the top of the hill. A
grey expanse; dull fires
throbbing on its seas.
Words and phrases (day, soul, nature, dull fires) are repeated again in the third stanza. I suspect formal considerations, some construct of poetry unknown to me, are at play. Something is different here, too. The speaker gazes down from a high vantage (“the top of the hill”), like Superman in the clouds or the gods on Olympus. Now my interpretation shifts. Perhaps this is a poem from the perspective of a superhero ripped from the “funnybooks” and relocated to our grimy wan existence, where everything is smudged with boredom.
I flip back to the Table of Contents and notice another title, “Green Lantern’s Solo.” Wait, so this old Black poet from the 1960s was actually and seriously reading books published by DC during the Silver Age of Comics (1956-1970)?
I return the The Dead Lecturer to a place on the shelf more obscure than where I found it—as if someone might discover and abscond with it in my absence—and run back to my dorm room. I’d brought several comics with me to college, including a DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest collection of reprinted Green Lantern stories published in 1980, which reveals something else that’s interesting: The Green Lantern oath Jones presents is the one from the character’s relaunch in 1959.
Back in the lounge, I retrieve the book and read in his biography on the back cover that Jones was 25 years old when this incantation was initially published. Which means the poet was reading comics well past the age when most people give up the habit. He was a hardcore nerd!
I dip into “Green Lantern’s Solo”[5] and it’s even more gothic, more despondent, more apocalyptic in its imagery and language. It begins:
A deep echo, of open fear: the field drawn in
as if to close, and die, in the old man’s eyes
as if to shut itself, as the withered mouth of
righteousness beats its gums on the cooling day.
Of course, in musical terms, a solo is a stretch of music played by a single performer. Here, the solo is ostensibly generated by Green Lantern, whose secret identity is military test pilot Hal Jordan. Green Lantern wields an alien-bestowed power ring that allows him to protect the universe. The ring conjures anything he desires using green energy—giant fists to pummel bank robbers, giant nets to snare runaway U.S. Army ordnance, giant hawks to combat pterodactyls on other planets. No rollicking display of superpowers in this poem, however. Rather, the speaker of “Green Lantern’s Solo” plays a shattered instrument tuned to the key of doom. It reminds me of Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen (1986), a cataclysmic take on American superhero comics that pushed the genre to its breaking point—then pushed harder.
Even better, Jones’s poem offers a typographical gimmick. That first stanza forms the top of an empty square on the page, a space shaped like a comic-book panel devoid of superheroes and speech bubbles. With the gutter on the left side of the panel, the stanza that creates the panel’s border on the right is a mélange of decay and bladder issues: His urine scatters/as steel, which will fall/on any soft thing/you have. (Murder/is speaking of us.) Then, establishing the bottom border of the contentless panel is a third stanza, which offers the gruesome image of being “killed by wild beasts,” followed by the entombment of academic life.
Having been torn into small echoes of lie, or surrounded
In dim rooms by the smelly ghosts of wounded intellectuals.
These lines bring to mind a couple of poems from my British lit survey, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” with its crepuscular appraisal of the elite and their “Shakespherian rags,” along with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” where “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.” Oh, the shallow hollow horror!
Then there’s a line in “Green Lantern’s Solo” that stops me in my tracks. My friend, the lyric poet, who has never had an orgasm. Hang on. How does the speaker’s friend factor into this solo? Is Green Lantern expressing dismay at a world made loveless—orgasmless—by “the social critic” and “the slow intellect” of the 1960s? What and with whom is the speaker taking issue?
The poem gets even weirder, more chilling, in the next several lines. They seem to puncture the myth of drugs and creativity. This part is especially troubling: Dead hero/for our time who would advance the nation’s economy by poking holes/in his arms. Is that the lecturer in the book’s title? An ordinary overdose?
Years earlier, I watched Clint Eastwood’s 1988 Charlie Parker biopic, Bird, in the historic Tampa Theatre. That was when I learned about the connection between jazz and heroin addiction. This information seems like old news for Jones in this poem. He tables the discussion, though, in favor of a bigger concern—namely, that art symbolizes a species at war with itself, a world incinerated for the hell of it, women “whispering their false pregnancies through the phone,” selfishness conducted in the name of knowledge and beauty, for the sake of “dignity” and “intelligence.” The sneering, contemptuous manner in which the speaker presents these words is consciousness-searing at this incipient stage in my development as a writer. And then Jones brings the pith: No man except a charlatan/could be called “Teacher.”
A second, smaller, blank comics panel appears again, this time bordered on the righthand side by a stanza that opens:
What we have created, is ourselves
as heroes, as lovers, as disgustingly
evil. As Dialogues with the soul, with
the self, Selves screaming furiously
to each other. […]
In the speaker’s estimation, we are at once Dr. Frankenstein and the Monster, singularly and collectively, a virtual babble of angry voices that serve no purpose other than to shriek. In other words, “Green Lantern’s Solo” is a bubblegum-tinged blast of existential rage, with moments of sly humor, couched within the typographical effect of vacated comics panels—or a concrete comics poem stripped of graphics, if you will. The bright visual flair of a Green Lantern comic book is jettisoned and replaced by images in verse, all of them harrowing, all of them hostile to the academy, especially with the lecturer, the teacher, dead of an OD perhaps. No love is lost here for the comics medium either, for the joy and pleasure that they provide. Why didn’t Jones instead explore the seductive power of superheroes to make his points?
To answer that question, and possibly others I haven’t asked yet, I run across campus to the library and find The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, first published in 1984 and written by someone named Amiri Baraka—the name, it turns out, Jones adopted in 1965. Impatiently thumbing through the pages, searching for “Green Lantern,” I eventually find what I’m looking for and, well, his own commentary on the poem is limited, spare, and parenthetically grafted onto a rather pointless sentence about another, altogether different, pop-culture character.
(… Green Lantern, a caped crusader from the comics I also dug. I put his incantatory dedication to fight against evil in my book The Dead Lecturer. To wit: In Blackest Day/In Blackest Night/No Evil Shall Escape My Sight/Let Those Who Worship Evil’s Might/Beware My Power/Green Lantern’s Light.” A green ring he recharged in front of a green lantern which gave him all kinds of powers. Powers, I guess, to reach the absolute.)[6]
The word “absolute” stops me in my tracks. I put the book down and stare right through a pretty co-ed nearby, who scowls back at me. That last word is a giveaway, revealing the aim and the audacity of Jones’s verse.
Now I walk slowly back to the lounge, deep in thought, and spend the next several hours studying The Dead Lecturer. I find again and again that Jones is constantly, uncompromisingly arguing with authority and systemic forces, tearing down the hypocrisy, the new clothes, of the empire and its sycophants. By adorning his wranglings with comics and pop-culture references (often obvious in the titles of the other poems in the collection), Jones approaches the reader from a softer angle before delivering ferocious blows to the “charlatans,” the “devious,” the “totally ignorant/who are our leaders.” Jones seeks nothing less than absolute justice, like Green Lantern, and for this reason, he is a poet once indispensable and impossible to relate to.
Moreover, Jones doesn’t just teach me how to incorporate pop culture into my writing. Over the course of that semester and the next, he sends me deep into the library stacks to look up everyone from Edward Dorn to the Hollywood character Willie Best, to whom he pays tribute in the eight-part sequence “A Poemfor Willie Best.”[7] Indeed, Jones’s idea of picking up a pop-culture artifact (comic book, radio show) and examining it from a wildly unrelated perspective, from ideological oppression to the dullness of everyday existence, using it to launch a broad critique of culture and society, gives direction to and animates my very first poems. He teaches me a valuable lesson on writing about unpopular culture, or obscure pop culture, which is this: When you compose a poem, when you pen an ode to a person or book that you once cherished, you must say goodbye or adopt an elegiac tone for it to really matter, to really move the reader. Everything in The Dead Lecturer is a bittersweet farewell to childish things, to the innocence of youthful delight. As I learn in my further exploration of this poet, Jones/Baraka never again writes about pop culture with the same intensity.
Today, critics insist that “Green Lantern’s Solo” stands as an example of Afrofuturism, a literary effort that uses sci-fi to enable Blacks to connect with a lost African ancestry and imagine an alternate liberating future. Perhaps. But to me, there is no future and no African past in the pleasure that superhero comics afforded young LeRoi Jones. These objects of white European modernity are just that: objects that must be put away for the deeper more complicated work of revolution, of justice, to be done.
I don’t agree with everything Jones says in this collection and his autobiography is Dantean in delineating his bitter feuds with everyone on the left side of the political spectrum, including his wife. However, The Dead Lecturer is a keeper. Its liveliness and commitment to truth-seeking is, in a word, absolute in an era when the possibility for genuine freedom seems to slip further into the past. As Jones writes in “Green Lantern’s Solo”: The completely free are the completely innocent, of which no thing I know can claim.
I take this at face value when writing my first poetry collection, Monster Fashion, the title poem being a series of catalog descriptions for a clothing company of the damned, showing that what we wear reveals much about our inner creature, our secret desire to be leashed, rather than liberated.
Most importantly, however, Jones shows me that we might leave comic books behind, but they can never truly exit our imagination. Sixty years after its publication and thirty years after reading it in college, The Dead Lecturer is a book I return to again and again to spark my imagination whenever life feels like a dull expanse.
_________________________________________
1 Jones would change his name to Amiri Baraka after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965. I refer to Baraka as Jones only to communicate my initial experience of Baraka’s powerful verse for the first time as a college undergrad without any Internet to assist me.
2 The epigram is part of the dedication to Edward Dorn. I later learn that Dorn was one of the Black Mountain Poets. He wrote a picaresque verse epic called Gunslinger. The five-book poem inspired horror novelist Stephen King enough toname the first book of his The Dark Tower series “The Gunslinger.”
3 The show ran from 1973 to 1985 on ABC as a Saturday-morning cartoon. It was based on the Justice League of America comic-book series published by DC Comics since 1960.
4 Jones, LeRoi. The Dead Lecturer (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 37.
5 Jones, Lecturer, 67-70.
6 Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1997.
7 Jones, Lecturer, 18-21. Film legend and comedian Bob Hope praised Best (1913-1962) as “the most natural actor I’ve ever seen” after working with him on the movie The Ghost Breakers (1940).
Jarret Keene’s dystopian adventure novel Hammer of the Dogs was published by the University of Nevada Press. Dr. Keene is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches American literature and the graphic novel. He has written travel guides, a rock- band bios, and poetry collections, and has edited the anthologies Las Vegas Noir and Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas.