6 - Kinship as History

Summary

… solemnly pledging myself anew to the sacred cause, I subscribe myself.

– Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave

I hope to embrace a generation of people living through history.

– Sam Cornish, personal interview

The family signature is always a renewing renaissancism that ensures generation, generations, the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery.

– Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987: 106)

In 1971, at the height of the Black Arts Movement in poetry, Beacon Press published Sam Cornish's Generations, a powerfully ordered sequence of brief but highly focused poems on black historicized kinship. The book received favorable reviews in the white press but little attention from Cornish's peers in the black community. Although his family and social background gave Cornish a thorough firsthand understanding of the stresses of contemporary black urban America, it was apparently insufficient, in the opinion of some in the movement, to authenticate his poetic vision of “people living through history.”

Born into the austerity of urban poverty in Baltimore (a place Tolson had called “the city of contradictions, at the mouth of the Patapsco River” [1982: 271]), Cornish early developed a poetic flexible enough to accommodate the vernacular of his neighborhood and learned enough to depict fully the culture he both inherited and invented. In 1964, while part of Baltimore's developing political and literary underground, Cornish self-published (under his Beanbag Press imprint), a sixteen-page pamphlet entitled Generations and Other Poems.