THE RELEVANT QUEER: Owen Dodson, A Poet and Contribution Reassessed, Born November 28, 1914

Owen Dodson portrait, 1979. Photo Anthony Barboza
Owen Dodson portrait, 1979. Photo Anthony Barboza

“All over the world we are a sad people, but when you see something special, and when you leave the theater you can say what a wonderful world this is.”

TRQ: Owen Dodson, Born November 28, 1914

Poet, novelist, playwright and theatre director Owen Dodson was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 28, 1914. Best known as a drama professor at Howard University, Dodson began writing after the Harlem Renaissance and before the Black Arts Movement.

His writing style combined Western literary traditions with Black vernacular. Politically, Dodson advocated for the role of integration and interconnection in social justice.

Born in Brooklyn to Nathaniel and Sara Elizabeth Dodson, he grew up in Flatbush. His family was religious and a series of strokes left his mother paralysed. By the time Dodson was 11, his mother was dead.

When Dodson was 12, his father, a journalist for the American Press Association and press agent for Booker T. Washington, passed away. Before his death, his father introduced Dodson to the work of Washington, W. E. B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson.

Dodson attended Jefferson High School, where the principal encouraged the students to recite poetry. He attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

While at Bates, Dodson’s writing earned him admission to Yale’s School of Drama. At Yale, he produced his first play, Divine Comedy, based on the tragedy Medea, about a Depression era con-artist in the antebellum South. After graduation, Dodson taught at Spelman College in Atlanta where he met many significant Black intellectuals.

In 1937, Dodson won the General Education Board fellowship. In 1940, during World War II, he joined the Navy, where he wrote poetry and directed plays. In 1944 he wrote and staged New World A-Coming at Madison Square Garden. Afterwards, as executive secretary on the Committee for Negro Mass Education, he worked in Hollywood to advocate for more realistic minority representation. In 1945 he won a Rosenwald fellowship.

In 1946 Dodson published Powerful Long Ladder, a collection of poetry whose power rested in its emotional style. A reviewer at Poetry, Jessica Nelson wrote;

“Every good Negro poet has a double allegiance…. He belongs to the great spiritual
brotherhood of sensitive intellectuals and is more closely akin to them than to the downtrodden sharecroppers of the south; but he can not and should not forget that he is a Negro … he is privileged and articulate, he must speak for those who are not. Owen Dodson celebrates the wrongs of his special minority, not with bitterness but with sorrow.”

However, most critics found that Dodson sense of emotion was too heavily inspired by his skin color. Dodson’s writing of racism and powerlessness lead to poor sales and professional obscurity.

In 1947 he joined Howard University as associate professor in English. He participated in Anne Cook’s drama department, which performed his plays. During his 25 years at the university, Dodson taught Debbie Allen, Amiri Baraka and Ossie Davis. In 1949 he organised America’s first European tour for college students. In 1953 Dodson earned a Guggenheim fellowship.

Dodson went on to teach at Vassar, Kenyon Colleges and Cornell University. In 1969 he was poet-in-residence at the University of Arizona. He published the semi-autobiographical When Trees Were Green in 1967.

Through out most of his career, Dodson felt that homophobia prevented his work from being acknowledged within academia or in the media. Additionally, Dodson’s alcoholism began to impact his career, and he retired from Howard in 1967. That same year Bates College awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 1968 he won a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.

He published The Confession Stone: Song Cycles in 1970, and The Harlem Book of the Dead, with James VanDerZee and Camille Billops, in 1978.

Dodson died on June 21, 1983 of heart failure in New York City.

Since his death, scholars have reassessed the work of Black poets of the 1940s and 50s. In writing for Modern American Poetry, Joanne Gabbin writes;

“… cultivated their individual voices by synthesizing elements from the western literary tradition and their own vernacular tradition…. These poets, in keeping with the continuing development of the radical/political strain in African American poetry, also pursued a brand of social justice that emphasize integrationalism and a sensitivity to international connection and socialistic movements.”

Owen Dodson with Mark Fax on the piano, a Howard University colleague, circa 1960s. Photo Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives
Owen Dodson with Mark Fax on the piano, a Howard University colleague, circa 1960s. Photo Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives
Owen Dodson, 1942. Photo Carl Van Vechten
Owen Dodson, 1942. Photo Carl Van Vechten
Owen Dodson on cover of Come Home Early, Child published 1977
Owen Dodson on cover of Come Home Early, Child published 1977
Owen Dodson in New York City, 1942. Photo Carl Van Vechten
Owen Dodson in New York City, 1942. Photo Carl Van Vechten
Owen Dodson portrait, 1979. Photo Anthony Barboza
Owen Dodson portrait, 1979. Photo Anthony Barboza

About the Authors:

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and he is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore.

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Sources:

Encyclopedia

NY Times

Washington Art

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