Constrained to honor (PoemTalk #71)

Claude McKay, 'If We Must Die'

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Herman Beavers, Salamishah Tillet, and Kathy Lou Schultz joined PoemTalk producer and host Al Filreis to talk about Claude McKay’s widely anthologized sonnet, “If We Must Die” (1919).  Its content advocates counterviolence in response to racist violence; its form is the exquisitely constrained Shakespearean sonnet, aligned with English poetic mastery. Does pushing through this formal constraint bring McKay’s speaker toward freedom or fatedness? Does the sonnet as a formal choice befit a cultural inside or an outside? Is the Anglophone literary tradition itself at risk if the super-talented Afro-Jamaican sonneteer is killed while fighting back, and what might it mean if McKay put it too — the tradition — in harm’s way? And what of the poem’s lack of explicit racial marking? The political positioning of this poem (published first in the radical-left Liberator) seems clear enough as a matter of its semantic sense, but such a stance opens wide when one reads the poem as a formal intervention — broadens so much that our four-way conversation inevitably ranges across numerous interpretive options. There is defiance as well as constraint in the message of the poem about a heralded proud response to the awful Red Summer, but, so too, both defiance and constraint in the poem as a poem.

This episode of PoemTalk was engineered by Zach Carduner and edited, as always, by Steve McLaughlin. PoemTalk is a collaboration of the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation.  It is published as a podcast series in Jacket2 and available for subscription and download in iTunes. In your iTunes store searchbox, type “PoemTalk” and you'll easily find us.

If We Must Die