www.re-markings.com
The Poet Harry Lloyd Van
Brunt:
Memories of My Benevolent
Teacher
Tijan M. Sallah
Recently, I
have been thinking of the late Harry Lloyd Van Brunt, who, in his poetic
career, has gone by several names: H. L. Van Brunt in his early years, and
Lloyd Van Brunt in his later. I wish to discuss how I came to know him, as well
as his intriguing life and poetry. I was his student in the seventies, and
attended his Writers’ Workshop held at the Hambidge Center for the Arts, near
Dillard, in northern Georgia. Since that experience, whenever we spoke
intermittently by phone—he often referred to me as his “best student ever.” Although a flattering endorsement—I often
wondered what this meant. Was it because I had published more in various genres
than he ever did, or was he comparing me with other students he has had? I
never bothered to inquire. Instead, I
simply registered an inner gratitude for being appreciated by my former teacher—my
literary maestro. I came to understand more of what he meant in a letter he
wrote to me from his West End, New York Apartment dated December 13, 1996, after
a phone conversation. I had promised him then that I will write an article on
his poetry and our friendship, and he was excited about the prospect. He noted:
“Here are the reviews of my poetry that I can find copies of. More do exist but
I have either forgotten about them or did not keep copies. It’s so good of you to be interested in my
work after all this time. As I read your books of poems, I was proud of you,
the pride one has in one’s best pupil.
And grateful that I was in part responsible for causing more good poems
to exist.”
I studied
creative writing under Van Brunt in 1977, while in my senior year at Rabun Gap
Nacoochee School. The Nacoochee school was home to the famous Foxfire journal—a
nationally popular Doubleday, Anchor publication in the 1970s and 80s started
by Eliot Wigginton—and ran by Nacoochee School students, who interviewed
traditional folks from the Southern Appalachia mountains about their home arts
and crafts, their stories and customs, and their folk remedies. The Nacoochee
school was perched on the valley of Dillard, Georgia (near Clayton) in the
midst of the green foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The school’s
environment was breathtaking scenery, a lush eco-system of mountains dotted
with maples, oaks, birch, pines, spruce and hickory coexisting with deer,
foxes, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, chipmunks and other wildlife. Log cabins spattered
the landscape, and so did clusters of cow-herds feasting on distances of green
in the valleys of Rabun Gap.
I had come from
West Africa to the US in the seventies fed on all the seductive myths of
America. I had come from a Sere Kunda, a small town near Banjul, the capital
city of the Gambia, which was located on a savannah plain. I grew up there with
mangoes, guava, baobab, bananas, papaya, varied palm, red wood and sparse
vegetation that populated the fragile Sahelian habitat. Hare, antelopes,
monitor lizards, agama lizards, snakes, pigeons, red-billed hornbills and
varied species of birds, and hyenas animated the landscape. The highest
buildings in my hometown in those days were three-storey buildings. I had come,
but suddenly found myself in a denser atmosphere of tall, vertical architecture
in Atlanta and, within a few miles out, that changed into a wilder and greener
habitat that, in every sense, resembled a jungle, except that it lacked the variety
and spice of tropical wildlife. I had arrived in America spoon-fed on myths
about America: Hollywood soap operas and Cowboys and Indian myths. I had come with an expectation of America that
was crowded with indomitable skyscrapers. I arrived on Delta airlines at Atlanta
airport. Suddenly, I had to get used to crowds in a compressed space and to
navigate signs and signals to the airport taxi lot. Mary Onalaja, a Nigerian
woman airport worker, saw me looking clueless, and knew I was a newly arrived
African greenhorn, and voluntarily assisted me to the taxi parking lot. She
asked whether I had the taxi fare, and I told her I had only eighty dollars to
take the bus, and so she told me to wait that her husband will be coming to
pick her after a night’s work, and they will take me to the Greyhound Bus
Station. With the help of this guardian angel, I was able to take the Greyhound
bus, which drove us around the city, during which I was able to admire the
towering skyscrapers of Atlanta, which conformed to my myth of America. While
riding the bus, I absorbed the fast-moving scenery through my window and saw a man
in full blown Afro zoom past us in a big Chevy Impala, with windows down,
moving his head to the pulsating rhythm of James Brown. His stereo was booming:
“Say it loud, I am black and proud!”
Yes, this was America. This was the America I saw in the movies. I gazed
at the domineering colossus of Peachtree Plaza. I glanced at the other allied
sky-scrapers. This further reinforced my myth of America. That myth, however, suddenly
evaporated as the Greyhound bus shuttled me out of Atlanta through hundreds of
miles of lush green landscape (of pine, maple, hickory, and other assorted
trees) and occasional red brick bungalow and log cabin small towns to drop me
eventually at the Nacoochee School in the valleys of Rabun Gap.
Rabun Gap was
an unlikely place for a young black West African in the seventies. I felt like
a fish out of water, or better still a tilapia out of a Guinea stream. I
encountered curious attitudes—some friendly and some, blatantly racist. However,
I soon transformed from a tropical tadpole into a frog that could walk on land
and swim in water. I quickly learned that adaptation is the survival lore of
the immigrant. It was at Rabun Gap I first met H. L. Van Brunt. What tied a
young teenage black West African student to his white Oklahoma poet-guru in
Rabun Gap was pure fortune—if not serendipity.
But was it all serendipity? My
English teacher at the Nacoochee school was Edith Christy, a blonde woman of
motherly pre-disposition. She never had a child of her own; so, her favorite
students became her children. I was one of her favorite students, and she saw
potential in my high school creative writings. Christy was a large woman of
genteel Southern demeanor; she always tied her hair into a knot, neatly lying
on the back of her neck. She became enormously interested in my writerly life
and ensured that I got connected to Van Brunt and enrolled in his creative
writing workshop. Van Brunt’s workshop was held from August 8-13, 1977. It was
a small, but well-attended class. Experimenting writers from various parts of
the American South participated, and it included: Edith Christy herself, Elaine
Davis, Edna Phillips, and Glenda Webb from Franklin, North Carolina; Nancy
McKinley from Plantation, Florida; J. J.
St. Vincent from Athens, Georgia; Mardi Brown from Toccoa, Georgia; Martha
Barlett from Albany Georgia; Rosemary Collins from Zionsville, Indiana;
Elizabeth Holden (wife of Dr. Reuben Holden, then President of Warren Wilson
College) and myself from the Nacoochee School. I was one of the few men, and in
fact—the only immigrant, and the youngest at the workshop. Because of my
relative toddler-status, many participants were curious about my country of
origin and friendly to me. I also participated vigorously in the discussions
with my non-American accent. The participants were mostly in their mid-lives,
and I forged lasting friendships—one of whom, J. J. St. Vincent even invited me
that Thanksgiving to spend at her home in Athens, Georgia. She later started a
literary journal, The Oconee Review, with Van Brunt, which featured my
poems in it.
Before the
workshop ended, on Friday, August 11, 1977, participants had a public reading
of their creations during the workshop at the Hambidge Hall. The hall was packed to capacity. In the
audience, a poet by the name of Gary Steven Corseri, who was then poetry editor
of the Atlanta Gazette, came to me, after hearing me read, and asked me
to submit some poems to his publication for consideration. Luckily, he accepted
my satiric poem, “Worm Eaters,” which was published in the February 17, 1978
issue of the Atlanta Gazette. The poem, reproduced below, poked fun at
those who led double lives. I published it while in high school, and it became my
first poetry publication in a national periodical in the United States.
Come, we will
eat baked worms.
At night, we
will walk down the streets
like two
Mongolian soldiers
in the regime
of Kublai Khan.
We will feed on
the fresh midnight air
and empty our
lungs of the day’s pollution.
While we head
to see our girlfriends,
let us stop by
Cherokee canteens
and buy lemons
to freshen our lips.
So that as we
meet them,
They would not
even know, we are worm-eaters.
After the
workshop, I kept my correspondences with Van Brunt. He became my mentor. He would write and
encourage me during my undergraduate student years at Berea College, in Kentucky,
as well as my graduate school years at Virginia Tech. I studied economics in
college and graduate school, and was enticed by the logic and ease with which I
sailed through the mathematics. However,
literature remained the yearnings of my heart. I often felt that my inner
calling was to be a writer, even though the demands of survival compelled me in
the direction of working as a professional economist. During my student years,
Van Brunt would write to me and send me his own autographed books and other poetry
publications, as gifts. He was a teacher who followed up and cared. One of the
books he sent me, which transformed my understanding of modern Western poetry,
was William Pratt’s excellent primer-anthology, The Imagist Poem, which
I thought was the best compact work of contemporary imagist poetry I have ever read.
Pratt understood Western poetry and its traditions with remarkable depth. The
introduction to his anthology was brilliantly insightful. I have since read and
re-read Pratt’s work over the years for its clear guidance. I had also recommended
it to many budding poets who needed to learn the difference between the core
and the chaff, the “signal” and “noise,” in modern poetry. When Van Brunt sent
me an autographed copy of Pratt’s book, he inscribed it with the following
words, “For Tijan, poetry is what needs to be said.” The inscription was dated December
1, 1977. Those words rang in my mind for years—like the tintinnabulation of a
guardian angel. How correct Van Brunt was in what the poetic idiom was all
about. Poetry is a craft of the word, where the craftsperson has to sieve
delicately and selectively between image and message. Poetry is a minimalist
enterprise, where the words and message must be purged of the impurity of
excess.
Who was Van
Brunt? He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1936 and passed way in Levittown, Pennsylvania
in about 2012. Van Brunt was mixed racially and culturally. He was an American
mélange, so to speak—a man of Scotch-Irish, Dutch and native American Choctaw
stock. In appearance, he was always chic—and professorial in appearance, with
that recognizable stylish, affable face of an Elvis Pressley. If one did not
know his childhood background, one would think he had the panache of an T. S.
Eliot. He reminded one in his clothes
and appearance of an English gentleman. Van Brunt lived most of his adult life
trying to compensate for his deprived and abused childhood. He worked hard as a
poet, but he knew that hard work alone was not sufficient for success to knock
on the door of a poor white kid from an Oklahoma Appalachian hollow. He worked to inspire and create new poets by
teaching in schools and prisons. He worked
very hard on his poetry all his life and wrote fabulous poetry, but he also
worked to dust-up his appearance, thinking that such make-ups would catapult
him to success. He worked to build his
networks, but never succeeded greatly. He pursued the life and politics of
respectability, and so bought and wore classy clothes. He came to a reckoning with
his double (if not make-believe) life in a March 27, 1994 article he
wrote for The New York Times Magazine, in which he revealed the
perceptions his students had of him while teaching poetry in prisons:
They admired my
London-tailored suits, my Turnbull & Asser shirts and ties and silk
handkerchiefs that were oh-so-carefully folded and arranged. They admired
success, wanted to be next to it, associated with it. “Feel these threads,” a
prisoner once said to me. He put his hand on my shoulder as if to rub an ache
out. “Fine, fine.” They could never have suspected that for two decades I had
kept about $10,000 in debt with credit cards trying to make myself look like an
English gentleman.
Van Brunt had a
right to remedy the difficulties and deficiencies of his early childhood, even
if he may not have done it the best way. An old Southern saying goes, “Nothing
ventured; nothing gained.”
Van Brunt had a
difficult early life. His father abandoned his mother when he was only two; so,
he hardly knew his father. As if this misfortune was not enough, his mother,
Elva Gladys Johnson, who took care of him in his early years, lived in Tulsa
from 1920 to 1968, married an abusive man, and died from tuberculosis. Van
Brunt was separated from his mother at the early age of eight or nine (because of his abusive step-father) and
spent afterwards his life in orphanages and foster homes, where he was further deprived
and abused. His mother’s brief life of 48, which weighed heavy on him all his
life, was a paltry longevity, even by the health standards of those times. X. J.
Kennedy, in an introduction (page xviii) to Van Brunt’s Poems New and
Selected, 1962-1992 captures this well:
Van Brunt had a
remarkable life, the early part of it horrific….You would think that what Van
Brunt endured in growing up would have been enough to silence him permanently.
His parents married too young, and divorced when the poet was two. At about the same time, he was almost decapitated
when a drunken driver ran out of control.
At nine, when his mother contracted tuberculosis and his stepfather
wanted no more of him, he and his siblings were packed off to an orphanage in
Tulsa. There, he and his fellow prisoners were dominated by self-righteous,
God-praising matrons who, to correct sins, like to whip or strop their naked
charges. …. At eleven, young Lloyd led
an attempt to run away, but, caught and brought back, received a systematic
beating from a local police agent, designed to teach him gratitude. All this
Van Brunt relates memorably telling how he came to make his home in a locale
quite unlike Oklahoma—downtown Manhattan—and went through spiritual torment,
hard drinking, rages, psychotherapy. The story of his life, when he sets it
down in full detail, ought to be as remarkable and harrowing an autobiography
as we are likely to get from any American poet.
Van Brunt
published eight collections of poetry and one autobiography over a period of fifty
years: Uncertainties (1968); Indian Territory and Other Poems
(1974); For Luck: Poems 1962-1977 (1977); And The Man Who Was
Travelling Never Got Home (1980); Poems New and Selected, 1962-1992
(1990); Working Firewood for the Night (1990); Poems 1963-1993 (1993?),
Delirium: Selected Poems (2006) and an autobiography, Hardpan:
A Childhood (2000). It is no
surprise that his first collection, Uncertainties, was dedicated to his
mother, for her overwhelming large presence in his early life. Subsequent
collections, such as For Luck were dedicated to his grandmothers,
Rebecca Tucker and Esther Perkins, and his grandfathers, Robert E. Lee Johnson
and Peter Van Brunt. His And The Man Who Was Travelling Never Got Home was
dedicated to our mutual friend, Edith Christy, and his mega collection, Poems
New and Selected, 1962-1992, was dedicated to his long-time partner, Nina. Ironically, in no collection, does Van Brunt
dedicate a book to his father, which may have reflected the absence of his real
father in his life.
There is no
doubt that Edith Christy meant so much to him and me. Edith Christy, who lived
from 1939-1988 in Franklin, North Carolina and taught at the Nacoochee school,
was an altruistic, saintly figure. Her life was lived in service to others. Van
Brunt discusses this, using her nickname “Edie” in a memoriam, “Waking up in
Rabun Gap, 1988,” that “welding Edie’s waterfall/(her grace and heart’s
amplitude/jailed in the cracked red dirt)/say jewels of the grass/on a mountain
meadow/flash their fragmentary lives.”
In a letter Van Brunt wrote to me on October 17, 1996, he recounted the
qualities of our shared “private” mother Theresa:
Edith Christy
died in 1990. She was one of those one in ten people who hold the world
together, who make it possible for the more selfish rest of us to live
together. She wasn’t a saint (think God!) but she was divinely altruistic. I
still miss her. There are poems dedicated to her in these two books, and of
course my fifth book, And the Man Who Was Travelling Never Got Home (and
that’s the last time I’ll use a long title!), was dedicated entirely to her.
Please call me when you come to the City. It would be great to see you again.
In a March 21,
1997 letter Van Brunt wrote me from his New York West End Avenue Apartment, he
was feeling both broken-hearted and near-homeless, he noted: “Wish me
luck. I’ll need it. Nina and I are separating after twelve
years. I had to find a place to live by
15 June. I’ll probably spend a year or so tramping from one artists’ colony to
another. Though if my advance is large enough (i.e., from his then memoir, A
Houseful of Strangers, which he later published as Hardpan; italics mine),
I might put my belonging in storage and travel for a couple of years. I’ve
always wanted to see Africa, Eastern Europe (I have been in Russia), India and
the more interesting islands of the South Pacific. Keep in touch, and I’ll send
you my addresses as they change.” What
was amazing in the letter was Van Brunt’s continual optimism—despite being
faced with difficult odds. That a person who was near homeless, who should have
been overly consumed with finding a home as his top priority, was dreaming of a
future of international travel. But so resilient was the poet. Every log on his
path was a surmountable obstacle.
Van Brunt’s
poetry captures the searing trials and tribulations of his eventful life. After
Van Brunt’s father abandoned the family, his mother remarried to Charles Bryan
Reynolds, who lived in Tulsa from August 11, 1895 to April 15, 1969, dying a
year later after Van Brunt’s mother died. Reynold physically and sexually
abused the young lad. In a moving poem, “On the Death of C. B. Reynolds” which
appears in Van Brunt’s second collection, Indian Territory and Other Poems,
the poet pelts his stepfather with poetic stones in a fit of imaginative
disgust. The physical experience may have passed, but the psychological wounds
remained, as the poet engaged in what may appear like a futile (maybe
cathartic) settlement of scores:
I remember you
for what you weren’t.
How easily
authority sat upon you—
The sense of a
man who knew his place—
And with what
rightful wrath
Authority came
down.
The poet is bewildered
about how “abuse” done with self-righteousness sat with his stepfather’s hollow
teachings of faith.
I wonder if you
went to death
With the same
sense of place.
If, for a
moment, you lost trust
In the ways of
the Lord.
Certainly, you
admitted they were strange.
The anger of
the poet is amplified when he reflects, with that retroactive envious memory,
on how his childhood deprivation was even applied to such bare necessities as
food. Depriving a child of basic nourishment is a most cruel act, and may leave
permanent scars on a child’s body—if not also on their soul. The poet’s grievances against his stepfather
continued:
But you were
selfish. You reserved
The best you
had for your own senses.
The leanest
porkchop, the biggest eggs
Went on your
plate. Humbly we watched
You deliberate.
In the same
poem, the poet goes on to enumerate his stepfather’s hurtful words and other
abuses of his childhood, such as “He don’t seem so smart to me,” “Blockhead,”
and spitting at him—abuses summed up in the poet’s words, “Nights after days we
had arguments.” The poet sums up his anger at the end of the poem, “Charles
Bryan Reynolds…. Dead, …. of tuberculosis. I wish you well.” But it is an
ironical wish, as the poet further adds, “And ask your forgiveness of my hate.”
The majority of
Van Brunt’s poetry, however, are not about self-pity. In fact, the preceding
poem, where he wrestles with the demons of his childhood, are a rarity in his
work. He is foremost a poet who tries to escape the demons in his past by
finding solace in nature, in the rudimentary human constructs, and in the
desolation of the rural landscape of the American Southwest. His earliest
poetry, in my view, are the most striking. A poem, “On the Prairie,” is superb
example of the majestic poetic brilliance of Van Brunt—for it illustrates, in a
few sure imagistic strokes, the rustic simplicity of the prairie landscape, the
desolation and the isolation, and the tension between nature and civilization
battling in time, as nature slowly recruits and decomposes human constructs.
The house leans
back
like an old man
fallen asleep
in the waning sun.
A porch plank
lifts
a rusty nail.
No one lives
here now.
No other houses
for miles.
Nothing but
yellow grass
and sandstone,
keeping quail
company.
The poem is beautiful,
pristine and stoic.The language is lean and clean; it is poetry at its best, purged
of the impurity of excess. This virtuoso-achievement is generally typical of
Van Brunt’s poetry.
In another poem
from Van Brunt’s second collection titled, “Morning,” we are given a
deceptively simple poem that reminds me of Carl Sandburg’s famous poem,“The Fog,”
which featured an urban landscape, or William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheel
Barrow,” which featured a rural landscape. Van Brunt’s miniscule beauty
presents, with a few brush strokes, equally compelling images that capture the
tensions and interdependencies of a rural landscape:
nothing is more
silent than a star
except a heron
standing at the
water’s edge
neck cocked
like a gun
Omniscient in his
pedestal, the poet notes, “nothing is more silent than a star” but leads us to
the surprise, “except a heron.” The “silence” of the stars is related to the
“silence” of a predatory heron; the ritual of silence by the heron is the
deceptive foil before the violent, rogue act—“neck cocked like a gun.” For the
poet, the silent mood of the morning is a tension between the fisher-bird and
fish.
Gerald Stern,
whose name I first heard about from Van Brunt and whose poetry Van Brunt admired—especially
for his Walt Whitman-style—long, repetitive poetic lines and whose work I first
came to know when Van Brunt sent me an inscribed gift of Stern’s delightful
collection, Lucky Life, captures the spirit of Van Brunt’s poetry in a
blurb on Van Brunt’s book, For Luck: Poems 1962-1977 published by
Carnegie-Mellon University Press:
It is difficult
to identify Van Brunt’s writing with any ideological position either from
outside or inside the world of poetry. His is truly poetry stripped bare of any
allegiance to forces beyond himself, technical, aesthetic, philosophical, or
political. As such, it presents to the world a posture of poverty, and even
nakedness, but a poverty and naked-ness redeemed and transformed by an
overwhelming passion, tenacity and honesty. Van Brunt is really loyal to two
things: his subject and his language. Nothing else counts. Whether he is on the
trail of a horseshoe crab, or a stepfather or an old girlfriend there is always
the same integrity, and the same ruthless devotion to a language which doesn’t
compromise and a memory which doesn’t lie.
What I get from
Stern’s words, in a nutshell, is that in Van Brunt, we have a poet who is truly
committed to his craft and who does so with honesty and linguistic integrity.
Van Brunt is a poet of the simple individual voice who is sincere to his
experience and is not careless with language—which he uses (not as a
contraption for propaganda or promotion tool of any tin-pot ideology) but as a descriptive
device, a voice that is as clean and gripping as melting ice water.
Van Brunt has
received several praises for his writing. Norman Mailer in his blurb for Working
Firewood for the Night notes, “Lloyd Van Brunt brings off the nice feat of
writing good and elegant poetry about such everyday subjects as a wife wakening
in bed, or a meal cooking on a stove. His metaphors are never predictable,
which is to say that our minds go a little further than we would have expected
and encounter the exhilaration of poetry itself in his poems.” And Mailer is
spot on; Van Brunt’s poetry covers ordinary topics and engages simple images
that delight with surprise. His poems appear easy but the masterly talent
required to achieve them was not something to snort at.
When I read the
overwhelming nature-poetry of Van Brunt, I have often wondered, why such a
poet, who has been one of the best practitioners of the poetic craft, has been
so little anthologized in major anthologies of American poetry. In fact, I
don’t know of any major anthology of American poetry that has included his
work. Van Brunt was never a celebrity poet. He never gained much wealth or pull
from his works, but was definitely one of the most brilliant American poets of
his generation. When I read his poems, I am reminded of the works of the
British poet Ted Hughes, who was also brilliant at his craft but never made the
global poetry sensation that some far more inferior British poets made. Van
Brunt was a creature and lover of the American rural South who focused his work
on the everyday of his experiences, but, despite the fact that he loved America
and its rural landscape and achieved a lot with his artistry, I have always
been puzzled by why so little attention was paid to his poetry and person by
the American “literary establishment”?
Was it because of his “class” at birth in a country that often says it
has relegated “class” to the Old World? Was the reason for the snub of his person and
works because he did not go to the Ivy League schools of the Northern elites or
the Southern “Ivy Leagues” (such as Duke, Vanderbilt and Emory) of the Southern
elites below the Mason-Dixon line? Was it because he was a poet who was largely
self-educated? Or was it because he never belonged to any visible American
literary or poetic movement? Or was it that because his work never received
sustained serious critical attention from the leading American culture-making
journals and newspapers? I do not know. However, I would argue that Van Brunt,
because of what he had to say to the world and his amazingly well-crafted
poetry, was an American poet whose work deserved far greater attention and
should be looked at closely in future American poetry anthologies.
Van Brunt came
to this reckoning, in his later years, that the fame and recognition that he
had wanted but not openly sought had escaped him. He expressed this in “How to
Cope with Loneliness” in his last published book, Delirium: Selected Poems,
where he confronted the despair of his condition:
The times I lay
alone that year—
The year I did
Pennsylvania Poets in the Schools—
Were, as they
say, not my own choosing.
Some of the
women horny, others just lonely,
thought a New
York City poet must have some glamour,
even though I
wasn’t well-known or famous,
and none of my
poems were in Oscar Williams
and none of my
books (as I was often reminded)
reposed in
pristine oblivion
at the local B.
Daltons or Waldenbooks—
still, there
was my picture in the county newspaper,
and the only
other spare men in town
let it all hang
out at the 7-Eleven.
The poem, conversational
and sarcastic, is self-indicting. These desolate feelings of the poet do not do
justice to his great talent.
For me, Van
Brunt was an extraordinary artist who had a challenging childhood, but embarked
on his poetic craft and did it brilliantly. He gave a lot of himself teaching
poetry in schools and in prisons, mentoring budding poets, and writing fabulous
poetry up to the end. Yet, fame and attention eluded him. In his later life, he
appeared reconciled to his anonymous fate. I have often felt that the worst
thing that can happen to an important poet is to be unknown or ignored. A poet finds validation from being anthologized
and being continuously read. Van Brunt’s
poetry is neither easy to find in bookstores nor in American poetry
anthologies. But, judging by his output and the quality of his works, he is one
of the most accomplished American poets of his generation. The mark of his
poetry is superb artistry. As for me, his former student, Van Brunt made a huge
impact on my writerly life. Fame or no fame, and maybe unbeknown to him, he has
had an outsized impact on me, as a Gambian poet and writer, and, for that
matter, implicitly on Gambian and West African literature. Given the parochial
obsession of writers everywhere with their national letters, I don’t know of
how many American poets of his generation that could boast of such
transcontinental influence.
· Dr. Tijan M. Sallah, a
Gambian poet and writer, has published thirteen books, including six collections
of poetry, a biography, a short story collection, a work of literary criticism
and edited three poetry anthologies. His most recent books are I Come from a
Country (poems) and Saani Baat: Aspects of African Literature and
Culture (literary essays). He was Guest-editor for the Re-Markings’ special
number, A World Assembly of Poets: Contemporary Poetry, published in
2017.
Re-Markings Vol. 25 No.1 March 2026. pp.36-46.
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