#toomer

[nerds-yearbook]

The Epic Imprint series St George (and all the other titles in the Shadowline Saga) was cancelled due to low sales with the last issue being 8 with a cover date of August, 1989. The story was completed with the miniseries Critical Mass. The issue did introduce Jeong Lee, created by Dwayne McDuffie and Jim Lee. ("Grace" St George 8#, Marvel/Epic Event)

[roughridingrednecks]

Toomer in Florida

[apoemeveryday]

harvest song by jean toomer, from cane.

[softly-and-suddenly]

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House // Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper" // Toni Morrison, Beloved // Alison Bechdel, Fun Home // Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

[soulmaking]

Jean Toomer

[notchainedtotrauma]

I do want to point out that the popular poets and popular poems here, the Mary Oliver type, are rarely from Black poets (I’m very keen on the “Black” of it all). You might see Audre Lorde in passing, maybe Lucille Clifton, but very few Black poets are widely circulated, reblogged, screenshotted on this site and  for me that’s a difficult pill to swallow. And they’re quite easy to find too, so...This has nothing to do with “representation” or “diversity” but about erasure and who seems to exist in the poetic imagination.

[mangogatherer]

Jean Toomer

[uispeccoll]

#VoicesfromtheStacks

Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist associated with the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. Raised by his mother, Nina Elizabeth Pinchback, Toomer attended both segregated Black schools as well as all-white schools. In 1922 he moved to Sparta, Georgia to take the position of a school principal. It was while living in the South that Toomer began to write extensively about the African-American experience, culminating in his first novel and most famous work Cane in 1923.

Toomer had a mixed, largely white ancestry that influenced his beliefs and writing throughout his life. He disavowed his association with the Harlem Renaissance due to his resistance to be classified under racial boundaries and desire to simply be considered an American author. Evidence of his complicated relationship with race can be seen in the example of his marriage certificate to a writer and activist Margery Latimer, where he is identified as white. Whether this was purposeful to Toomer’s beliefs or because of interracial marriages illegality is debated by scholars.

Toomer joined a spiritual movement under George Ivanovich Gurdjieff in the 1920s and 30s. During this time several writers studied under him, including Nella Larson and Zora Neal Hurston. He would ultimately go on to join the Quaker movement and write largely for Quaker publications in his later life.  

As stated, Toomer is best known for his 1923 novel Cane, a story cycle which intertwines the stories of six women, mixing prose and poetry into a three part work that explores many of the tensions Toomer saw during his time as the principal of a Black school in Georgia, and throughout his life as a man who moved between cultures— Black and white, North and South, and between genders. Cane was not commercially successful, but had immediate critical success and was lauded by Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois. Cane is cited as a classic of Black writing and of modernism.

Pictured in this post is a artist book rendition of Cane from the University of Iowa’s Special Collections, with woodcut illustrations. 

Call Number FOLIO PS3539.O58 C3 2000

Jean Toomer picture from Poetry Foundation

--Sarah D., Olson Graduate Research Assistant

[lascitasdelashoras]

Poetas, escritores

[haveyoureadthispoll]

A literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.

[leehallfae]

reading books feels so good …! assignments #suck but i actually love that my degree is forcing me to read so much like wow i feel inspired & fulfilled. who knew lol

[incorrectclassicbookquotes]

Nothing will get me emotional faster than when a stranger or family member who isn't the parent will take up the role of the parent without being asked. They're like this kid needs me so I guess I'm a parent now. An example of this is in the 1937 movie Captains Courageous when a little boy whose dad is always busy accidentally falls off a ship and gets rescued by a fisherman named Manuel who becomes a father figure to him. I'm right now reading about the author Jean Toomer's actual life and his father abandoned him so his Uncle Bismarck took up the role as father figure to him and am getting very emotional about it.

[loudlylovingreview]

Jean Toomer: Harvest Song

I am a reaper whose muscles set at sun-down. All my oats are cradled.But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it.I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry. I hunger.My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack’d fields of other harvesters.It…

[leafmouldandearth]

"Beehive" by Jean Toomer

Found on The Poetry Foundation.

[showmethesneer]

"As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman."

-"Fern" from Cane by Jean Toomer

[roysexton]

Summertime madness … join me for Answering Legal’s “Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp”

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