Though she is not as well-known as some of her contemporaries and has not received as much critical attention, poet, editor, and activist Margaret Danner was a central figure in the emergence out of the Midwest of the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In her five volumes of poetry, Danner was among the first African American poets to celebrate a continuity between African American culture and West African art and to treat the multiple African, European, and American heritages of African American people as a source of strength for the artist, not a liability. Such affirmation was to become a defining ideal for the radical Black Aesthetic of the late 1960s. Also, Danner has consistently been praised for how, through her careful craft, she used distinctive subtlety, irony, and evocative imagery and symbolism to link ethnic cultural heritage, spirituality, and beauty as the manifestation of political resistance. Finally, as the editor of two anthologies and as the founder of two writers’ workshops in Detroit and Chicago, Danner joined poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, and Haki Madhubuti in fostering community among African American writers in Detroit and Chicago and in bringing a new generation of African American writers to the public eye. In these ways, Danner offered an innovative sense that communal heritage was a source of imaginative and social freedom that could be realized through the spiritual meaning of artistic beauty, ideals that placed her at the center of the Chicago Renaissance.
Multicultural arts and identity seemed always to be intertwined for Margaret Esse Danner, who was born to Caleb and Naomi Esse of Pryorsburg, Kentucky, on January 12, 1915. Although she would not publish poetry until much later in her life, Danner cultivated her poetic talent as early as junior high school, winning first prize in a poetry contest for her poem “The Violin” when she was in the eighth grade. The poem is an early instance of Danner’s career-long interest in using Stradivarius and Guanerius violins to symbolize her knowledge and appreciation of European art, from the violin to the ballet, alongside her innovative concerns about African culture.
Danner’s public career as a poet began once she joined the socially conscious artistic community of Chicago, where her family had relocated by the time Danner had entered high school. She attended Englewood High School in Chicago before enrolling at Loyola and Roosevelt Universities. During this time, she was selected as one of the top ten African American poets as part of the University of Michigan’s contribution to “Patterns in American Culture.” Also, at the 1945 Midwestern Writers Conference at Northwestern University, Danner won second prize in the Poetry Workshop. She also received guidance and support from established editors and poets Karl Shapiro and Paul Engle, as well as African American writers Richard Wright, Owen Dodson, and Brooks, all of whom in turn had been influenced by sociologists such as Robert Park who saw culture as a means to social integration and equality. Such idealism about integration would soon have a place in Danner’s vision of ethnic affirmation.
As a poet of place, Danner began at this time to use her neighborhood and her family as the foundation for her innovative ideals of heritage and community. She was married twice, first to Cordell Strickland and then to Otto Cunningham. She and Strickland have a child, Naomi, who is the mother of Sterling Washington Jr., Danner’s grandson and one of the chief inspirations for her poetry. He is the young boy in Danner’s many “Muffin” poems in which she shows not only her joy and pride in being a grandmother and her admiration for the child’s innocent wisdom, but also her sense that one role of poetry is in conveying wisdom to succeeding generations. Muffin becomes her ideal audience for her meditation on how artistic beauty is the principal means to affirm cultural heritage. These “Muffin” poems include “Black Power Language,” about a child’s perspective on Black Vernacular English, and “For Muffin,” about a gift to the child of an Ashanti stool as a token of race pride. Ethnic community becomes a family for Danner, and its heritage is mirrored in its commitment to beauty and cultural memory.
Early in her career, like her fellow Chicago writers Brooks, Wright, Theodore Dreiser, and Carl Sandburg, Danner used the Chicago setting of her poems to reveal her concern that the social and economic forces of this brutal urban life destroyed the African self, a self that could potentially be healed through art like hers. Poems like “Garnishing the Aviary,” “The Dance of the Abakweta,” “The Visit of the Professor of Aesthetics,” “Edna Moten’s Attic,” “Best Loved of Africa,” and “The Painted Lady” exemplify her approach. All six of these poems explore the alienation that descendants of Africa feel when moving either from Africa or the South of the United States to Chicago. In “Garnishing the Aviary,” for example, the Africans who were adapting to the city were compared to birds who had feathers that, “though still exotic / Blend in more easily with those on the wings / Of the birds surrounding them.”1 Acknowledging the loss of distinctiveness this blending implies, the poet fears for “The Painted Lady,” “a small African / Butterfly gayly toned deep tan and peach.” The lightness of the colors is emblematic of the poet’s anxiety as the poem ends: “is there strength enough in my / Peach paper rose or lavender sea-laced fan?”2 Unlike Brooks and Wright, then, Danner is not sanguine about the alleged historical inevitability of integration that many Chicago writers imbibed with optimism from the “Chicago sociology” of Robert Park. Instead, Danner emphasizes what is potentially lost in this process, as in the end of “Best Loved of Africa”: “in Lincoln Park / Lies Bushman, best loved of Africa, huge / And beautifully black as he ever was, but dead.”3 Such a lament anticipates the radical Black Aesthetic of the 1960s, the ideal that African American writers should claim an ethnically distinctive and politically radical art based in African American and African cultures.
This distinctive vision of the need for cultural preservation led Danner to prominence in the 1950s. In 1950, she won a grant from the Women’s Auxiliary of Afro-American Interests. Also, in 1950 and 1951, respectively, Danner won the Harriet Tubman Award and the John Hay Whitney Fellowship for Far From Africa: Four Poems, with the latter fellowship intended to support a trip to Africa scheduled for that year but which she did not take until 1966. Between 1952 and 1956, the four poems for which she won the Whitney Fellowship, along with two others—the six mentioned above—were published in the Chicago-based Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a journal known for its commitment to the avantgarde and to introducing new writers to the public. Moreover, between 1951 and 1955, Danner served as an editorial assistant for that journal and, in 1955, apparently at the urging of Karl Shapiro, who was editor of Poetry at the time, was promoted to assistant editor. She was the first African American to hold the position, in which she served from 1956 to 1957. Finally, in 1956, she won the Native Chicago Literary Prize and, in 1960, a grant from the American Society of African Culture.
By the 1960s, Danner had combined her editorial work with her maturing poetry to become one of the most important figures in African American literary culture both in Chicago and in Detroit. Critics generally agree that Danner’s first full-length volume, Impressions of African Art Forms in the Poetry of Margaret Danner, first published in 1960, is her most important because of its distinctive emphasis on the value of African culture for African American art and identity and for its representation of the poet’s shift in perspective from the anxiety of poems like “Best Loved of Africa” to greater, more explicit affirmation. She is also praised for the way in which she suggests that such a shift is necessary for all Americans. In the volume, much of which was written while she was in Chicago, Danner reclaims the ideal cultural continuity between African art, generally exemplified for Danner by Benin sculpture, and African American as a remedy to the sense of cultural discontinuity caused by slavery and racism. The volume contains some of Danner’s best-known poems, including “The Small Bells of Benin,” about the symbolic tolling of literal bells of Benin sculpture calling for African American cultural self-awareness; “The Dance of Abakweta,” about how a presumably white American ballet instructor would misunderstand an African dance by trying to conceive of it in terms of that Western dance form rather than in terms of African spirituality; and “Etta Moten’s Attic,” about a friend’s collection of artifacts that helped inspire Danner’s own developing appreciation of African art. As Broadus N. Butler suggested in his introduction to the volume, Danner’s poems “probe into the social body and perform a kind of midwifery to assist the present rebirth and transformation of appreciations African American art.”4 In Danner’s own words, as quoted by June M. Aldridge in an article on Danner’s poetry, her verse was meant “to cause men, especially Blacks, to realize that Black roots are as deeply planted and authentic as those of other people with whom we must deal in creating this New World.”5
This ideal of transforming perceptions of African American people through African culture and this desire to make a “New World” from multiple cultural roots fed Danner’s leadership in the artistic communities in Chicago and Detroit. In 1961, in large part due to the success of this volume, Danner started as poet-in-residence at Wayne State University in Detroit, the first of several such posts she held throughout the rest of her life, including at historically black colleges Virginia Union in Richmond, Virginia, and LeMoyne Owen in Memphis, Tennessee. While in Detroit, Danner came to work closely with Dudley Randall, producing their collaborative volume Poem Counterpoem in which the two poets included poems on common subjects and alternated them on facing pages. Their paired poems dealt with issues ranging from the death of the four little girls in the infamous church bombing in Birmingham to the value and potential compromises of the Civil Rights Movement strategy of passive resistance. In her poem “Passive Resistance,” Danner declares “I want no more of this humility” and worries in “This is an African Worm” that such humility leads black people to “crawl and wait” rather than to stand up against oppression and actively claim equality.6 The fact that established presses were reluctant to publish the volume contributed to Randall’s desire to start Broadside Press in 1965, the black-owned and -operated publishing house that made Poem Counterpoem available in print in 1966, along with the works of many well-known and new African American poets. The press also reissued Danner’s first volume, Impressions of African Art in 1968. In 1962, Danner helped to establish the most prominent African American writers’ community in Detroit by converting an empty parish house of the King Solomon Church into Boone House, named after the minister whom Danner persuaded to open the space for a workshop for children. Boone House brought together poets like Randall, Owen Dodson, Robert Hayden, Hoyt Fuller, and Naomi Long Madgett, in addition to serving its area youth so that, as Randall put it, “we created a poetry community to inspire each other.”7 In this endeavor, Danner fostered the talents and careers of writers like Hoyt Fuller who would be instrumental in formalizing the ideals of the Black Aesthetic, making her, as Paul Breman put it, “the doyenne of Detroit’s black letters.”8
Spirituality became the final component of Danner’s art as her Bahá’í faith provided a basis for and terms by which to reconcile her knowledge of and commitment to African American culture and history with ideals of transracial and transnational unity. Danner even served from 1964 to 1966 as the touring poet with the Bahá’í Teaching Committee. Though this aspect of her verse has received practically no commentary, this spirituality transformed cultural anxiety into spiritual unity. For example, her consistent use of lace as a symbol for unity, including in the title of her 1968 volume Iron Lace, derives in part from the Bahá’í doctrine of the interconnected nature of all of the world’s major religions through their worship of the same divinity and the consequent Bahá’í belief that all humanity is therefore united despite national and cultural divisions. In “Today Requires a Lace of Truths,” Danner declares that ideals of human unity need to be “as eclectic as the lace that Truths form / in the stone of the temple of Bahá’í” and “as forever enduring in grace / as the intermolding of / the Benin Bronze.”9 African heritage and a religion rooted in the Middle East constitute the twin, “eclectic” and “intermolded” pillars of this ideal “New World” and therefore are twin sources of African American self-affirmation. Although some of her poems contain explicit references to the Bahá’í faith, Danner achieves her greatest spiritual effects when using the lace symbolism, to suggest that beauty derives from an aesthetic unity that is an analogy for social and spiritual harmony.
These effects are best demonstrated in her last volume, The Down of a Thistle (1976), a collection of new and previously published poems that, critics agree, constitutes her crowning achievement. Enhanced by the illustrations of Fred Weinman, the volume opens with two poems that elaborate upon the symbolism of the title thistle, a plant native to Africa where it is “accorded reverence” and transplanted to the United States where it grows thornier for self-defense in its new, hostile climate. The title poem, “The Down of a Thistle,” lays out a symbolic middle passage by implying the plant’s analogy to black people and asserting “that few get near enough / to enjoy the down.”10 “Endowned,” the second poem about thistles, concludes with the image of a hummingbird who gets past the thorns and “knows / that the down of a thistle is as soft / as the petal of a rose.”11 Using both traditional literary images, spiritual symbols, and African culture, these poems set the terms of alienation, alternative notions of beauty, and fundamentally shared humanity that necessitate the shift in perspective that would allow the beauty of the thistle to be appreciated.
This last volume makes quite clear the balanced terms of ethnic affirmation and human unity, political commentary and spirituality, by which Danner offers her beautiful protest of racism and her validation of black identity. These ideals also therefore guide the poems about the Illinois and Michigan locales in which Danner explores the new habitat of the thistle. For example, the fact that the first letters of the names of the Great Lakes spell “HOMES” gives Danner the chance to explore the meaning of her American locale for her emerging African sensibility. With a great deal of nature imagery, the second section of the volume offers poems like “Detroit Michigan” about willow trees that do not weep but bow respectfully and that follow the nonracial “green man,” who is loved by black and white, into a meeting of the “Eastern religion” of the Bahá’í.12 That section also contains most of Danner’s explicit Bahá’í poems and includes “The Lady Executive Looks at a Mangbetu Palm Wine Jug,” in which the speaker refrains from criticizing a white American’s misunderstanding of this African artifact until she herself understands its significance.
This tension between affirmation and alienation gets played out fully in the volume’s next section, called “Endangered Species.” In “Endangered Species,” a black pearl—the souls as well as the bodies and the culture of African American people—is disparaged for being black. But that same pearl—a reference to the pearl of great price in the Bible—gets aid from the “Caster”—a figure for God—who “stoops to groom it” and “intercedes / to help it shine full bloom” only after those who recognize its beauty also seek to give assistance.13 In “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form,” a man with a PhD runs an elevator, a clear criticism of a society that prevents educated black men from opportunities commensurate with their education. But as the title of the poem suggests, the speaker is not satisfied with the elevator man’s apparent acceptance of this “form” of life accorded to him and his people either. The speaker wishes instead that the elevator man—whose potential for uplift is implicit in his name—would “turn his lettered zeal / toward lifting them above their crippling storm.”14 The implication of both poems is that an oppressive society disparages African Americans in large part by not appreciating their beauty and that perhaps the most important gestures African Americans can make in response is to appreciate their own beauty and seek to help themselves, the result of which will be divine assistance. In this way, African Americans can resist the “modern pigs” (presumably including misguided black people) who, in “Endangered Species,” “can’t quite see the utter need / there’ll be for such a sooty stone.” By recognizing and acting on their commonality both within the race and across racial lines, the black pearls should bring about their own spiritual and cultural well-being.
Because of this emphasis on positive self-perception and communal unity and on the artistic celebration of African American people, Danner’s poems on African art and African heritage remain her most important poems even in this volume. A central example is “And Through The Caribbean Sea.” The poem opens by suggesting that “we” African Americans “have been forced to exist in a huge kaleidoscope world” and have “been shifting with time and shifting through space,” experiencing “whimsical” turns of the kaleidoscope “until any pattern or place / or shade is our own.”15 As Don L. Lee observed, the “references or allusions which are not African are meant to indicate a loss of identity.”16 The poem reads, “Until, who questions whether we’d be prone to yearn / for a Louis Quinze frame, a voodoo fire, / Rococo, Baroque, an African mask or a Gothic spire / or any style of any age or any place or name.”17 The transit through the Caribbean Sea to the “New World” has forced an adoption of Western culture and therefore confusion about which culture to claim, leaving the descendants of Africa susceptible to “any place or name.”
But as the title of the volume implies, this thorny problem has its soft, shared, and affirming down, its petals as soft as any rose, which is art. And for Danner, that affirmation has to do with how art helps to create the new identity in this New World, one in which, contrary to Lee’s assertion, the non-African references do not necessarily indicate loss. Those places and names do sometimes become “our own.” For example, in “The Slave and Iron Lace,” Danner celebrates the creativity by which a slave named Samuel Rouse transformed the materials of his enslavement—metal—into a self-affirming mode of expression. According to the poem, “The craving of Samuel Rouse for clearance to create / was surely as hot as the iron that buffeted him. / His passion for freedom so strong that it molded / the smouldering fashions he laced.” Artistic expression and freedom become synonymous for Danner and, in the context of the lace image, analogous to both social and spiritual unity. “How else,” the poem asks after listing several patterns the slave created in his metalwork, could he “create all this in such exquisite, fairyland taste, [so] that he’d / be freed and his skill would still resound / one hundred years after?”18 African American art, when developed in response to the craving for freedom and an awareness of history, validates the self of the artist and becomes validating heritage for the community. Her art places her in what Richard Barksdale describes as the African continuity, that “immense shining cultural highway leading from Beale Street down through the stressful centuries back to Benin.”19
It is precisely this eclectic heritage that, paradoxically, makes possible the creativity of Samuel Rouse and, the poem implies, of the Black Nationalist Margaret Danner herself. In one of her most important poems, “In a Bone White Frame,” Danner symbolically suggests that a unified and culturally affirming vision of African American culture can emerge for the poet herself even though she is “framed” by a potentially deadening white Western culture. Providing an artistic image for W. E. B. DuBois’s well-known concept of double consciousness, the poet “must make two paintings. / No spending all of my time acquainting / myself with ming blue, peach pastel.” To be whole, she must acknowledge the “huge mahogany oil” that “occupies me through every cell.” In other words, she must address both sides of her competing selves and the divided audience by accepting the “oil” of her biological and cultural inheritance. That mahogany painting of an African and the poem in which Danner discusses it both serve as counterweights to the possibility of the black artist losing herself in Westernized and abstracted beauty: “I won’t release this oil, / it goes where I go. / So, it will not be easy for us to fly.”20 But being grounded in the black past is neither deadening to creativity nor a rejection the West altogether but the best way for African Americans to realize that Black roots are deep and authentic in both traditions. This is why, in “Inheritance for Muffin,” Danner declares that she cannot leave Muffin monetary gold but she can leave him “this exquisitely carved Benin Bronze,” “this Senufo Firespitter mask,” “these modern bones so superbly carved” that they remind misguided viewers of “‘Rome’ and other classic places” though they were made on Beale Street and, finally, “these eclectic laces and lattices of the writings of Bahá’í / in the temple in Wilmette.”21 In short, she can give her grandson a heritage through her art, and therefore a positive sense of self.
In these ways, her art comes full circle, going to history and back to the family. For example, in “From Esse to Handy to Hayes”:
It is Black Art that leaps, churning up,
flaming out from the Esse furnace
within us, wherever we are flung.
Exploding into the streets and cities
of Black men,
from the beginning of our Benin past
to the blessed estate of Baha’u’llah.22
In this poem, Danner links her personal past to an African past by linking her maiden name to a city in Nigeria of the same name, a process of personalizing history and finding one’s meaning that she wanted her black readers to do. The individual poet’s creativity is but a species of the creativity of all “Black men” and comes to the surface in expression “wherever we are flung.” And that expression, Danner concludes, links the African American’s African past to the future “blessed estate” of human unity that was part of the prophecy of Bahá’u’lláh, the most holy figure of the Bahá’í faith. Integration here is not the loss she implies it to be in her apparent questioning of the ideals of Chicago sociology in her early work. It is self-affirmation. And in the intricate lace of this vision, Danner as artist becomes part of the heritage she so uniquely claimed and espoused.
It is no wonder, then, that Danner enjoyed continued public accolades in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during which time she published two more volumes and two anthologies. In 1966, Danner finally took her trip to Africa to attend the World Exposition of Negro Arts in Dakar Senegal, where her friend Robert Hayden won the prize for his volume A Ballad of Remembrance (1962) and where Danner herself read some of her poetry. She also used the trip to visit an African art exhibit in Paris. In 1968, in addition to Iron Lace, mentioned above, Danner also produced Brass Horses, an anthology published by Virginia Union University and, in 1969, a second anthology called Regroup, also published by Virginia Union. Throughout this period, Danner appeared at various writers conferences, including the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival at Jackson State College (now University) organized by fellow Midwestern poet Margaret Walker (Alexander) in November 1973. Perhaps the most important of Danner’s many appearances, this conference featured eighteen prominent African American women poets reading from their work and discussing contemporary poetry. The conference garnered significant attention, with a feature article in Black World in February 1974 and a photo essay in Ebony in March of the same year.
Throughout her eclectic and impressive career, Margaret Danner developed a distinctive vision that combined an awareness of African heritage, an appreciation of European art, a thorough examination and critique of the ideals of integration and assimilation and, ultimately, the ideal of spiritual unity to produce a powerful collection of verse affirming human unity through ethnic difference. Seeing African Americans and artists as communities with shared heritage, she fostered the success of a new generation of African American writers. Although Danner did not have any other major publications between The Down of a Thistle and her death in 1986, her work anticipates the most important trends of cultural heritage in African art since her first published poems, establishing her as something of a prophet for cultural unity and spiritual wholeness.
1. Danner Margaret. The Down of a Thistle: Selected Poems, Prose Poems, and Songs. Waukesha, Wisc.: Country Beautiful, 1976, 47.
2. Ibid., 78.
3. Ibid., 73.
4. Butler, Broadus N. “Introduction.” Impressions of African Art Forms in the Poetry of Margaret Danner. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1960, 2.
5. Aldridge, June M. “Benin to Beale Street: African Art in the Poetry of Margaret Danner.” College Language Association Journal 31 (2) (December 1987): 202.
6. Danner, The Down of a Thistle, 86, 98.
7. Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press. New York: Columbia, 2003, 105.
8. Aldridge, “Benin to Beale Street,” 205.
9. Danner, The Down of a Thistle, 41.
10. Ibid., 12.
11. Ibid., 14.
12. Ibid., 20.
13. Ibid., 59.
14. Ibid., 68.
15. Ibid., 117.
16. Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee). Dynamite Voices I: Black Poets of the 1960s. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971, 41.
17. Danner, The Down of a Thistle, 117.
18. Ibid., 103.
19. Barksdale, Richard. “Margaret Danner and the African Connection,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Cincinnati, Ohio, November 2, 1980, 3.
20. Ibid., 70.
21. Ibid., 76.
22. Danner, The Down of a Thistle, 108.
Adoff, Arnold, ed., The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Includes poems by Danner.
Aldrich, June M. “Langston Hughes and Margaret Danner.” The Langston Hughes Review 3(2) (Fall 1984): 7–9.
Bailey, Leonard Pack, ed. Broadside Authors and Artists: An Illustrated Biographical Directory. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974.
Barksdale, Richard and Keneth Kinnamon, eds. Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Includes poems by Danner.
Bontemps, Arna, ed. American Negro Poetry. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963. Includes poems by Danner.
Boyd, Melba Joyce. “‘Prophets for a New Day’: The Cultural Activism of Margaret Danner, Margaret Burroughs, Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 37 (November 1998): 55–67.
Brown Johnson, Patricia L., et al., eds. To Gwen with Love. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1971. Includes poems by Danner.
Danner, Margaret. Impressions of African Art Forms in the Poetry of Margaret Danner. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1960.
———. Iron Lace. Millbrook: Kriya Press, 1968.
———. To Flower: Poems. Nashville: Hemphill Press, 1963.
———, ed. Brass Horses. Richmond: Virginia Union University, 1968.
———, ed. Regroup. Richmond: Virginia Union University, 1969.
Danner, Margaret and Langston Hughes. Writers of the Revolution. Black Forum (BB 453).
Danner, Margaret and Dudley Randall. Poem Counterpoem. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1966.
Hayden, Robert, et al., eds. Afro-American Literature: An Introduction. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Includes poems by Danner.
Henderson, Stephen, ed. Understanding the New Black Poetry. New York: Morrow, 1973. Includes poems by Danner.
Pool, Rosey E., ed. Beyond the Blues: New Poems by American Negroes. Lympne: Hand and Flower Press, 1962. Includes poems by Danner.
Randall, Dudley ed. The Black Poets. New York: Bantam, 1971. Includes poems by Danner.
Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976.
Stetson, Erlene, ed. Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746–1980. New York: Morrow, 1973. Includes poems by Danner.
Thompson, Julius E. Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960–1995. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999.
Ward Jr., Jerry Washington. Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry. New York: Signet Books, 1997. Includes poems by Danner.
See also the Margaret Danner entry in DLB 41.