In Search of Synergy

In Search of Synergy E. Ethelbert Miller (bio) Literary anthologies are graveyards. In 1975 I coedited Synergy: An Anthology of D.C. Black Poetry, with Ahmos Zu-Bolton. I had met Ahmos the year before. He was working at a community center in Maryland and editing Hoo-Doo, a small press magazine. When Ahmos arrived on the campus of Howard University I knew his name because he had rejected poems that I submitted to his journal. He wrote a rejection note saying "this is not Hoo-Doo poetry." I was twenty-four and had recently graduated from Howard with a degree in African American studies, but my knowledge of the folklore of Black people was limited. Dressed in what I would quickly learn was his signature coveralls, Ahmos looked like he was a member of SNCC doing voter registration in the Deep South. He reminded me more of a civil rights worker than an editor. It was Ahmos who slipped me "medication" that helped reduce my Black Nationalist fever. Like a trickster or someone simply mysterious, Ahmos knew the art of writing grants and had mastered the skill of getting what some Afro-headed folks called white money. We were still living in the shadows of the sixties. My head was filled with quotes and slogans. I was an Eric Hoffer, true believer. I was a young writer learning the ropes. Ahmos taught me how to jab, bob, and weave. He taught me form and technique. I soon began to move around the ring of the literary world. Along with publishing a magazine, Ahmos was also interested in giving birth to books. He was always in need of a midwife for his ideas. One idea was to publish the first anthology of poetry written by D.C. Black poets. It was not a difficult task since I had started my Ascension Poetry Reading Series in April 1974. I knew many of the Black poets in the city. The most prominent were Sterling A. Brown, Owen Dodson, May Miller, and Dolores Kendrick. The actual idea for the anthology came from across the "tracks," as Ahmos would write in his introduction: This project was started in the spring of 1974—it was to be published by Some of Us Press (SOUP) from the other side of the tracks. However, [End Page 96] after I had asked my friend E. Ethelbert Miller to join me in the project (and we spent a couple of hectic weeks calling poets), SOUP decided that this wasn't what they had in mind. From that point the struggle was about funds. At one point we even considered a massive co-op involving all the poets in the anthology (that was suggested by Dudley Randall of Broadside Press, who was born in this city). Now, almost fifty years later, I pick up a copy of Synergy. The anthology came with a hole in the cover, another example of Ahmos being avant-garde or just a tad different from everything I ever imagined doing. There are too many voices that are silent now. Many left this world too soon either by sickness or even suicide. Why do I feel like an undertaker and not an editor? My memory brings flowers for Gaston Neal, Otis Williams, Winston Napier, Julia Watson, and Adesanya Alakoye. It is difficult to read an anthology of "contemporary" poetry and not think about who is missing. Maybe this is how Africans felt who escaped into the bush to avoid the ocean. You survive only to emerge to see who is gone and who is left. It was the musician Sun Ra who was disappointed with the politics of this planet and so he left—he only came back to tell people that he left. When I started reading Kevin Young's African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (2020), I found myself missing. Why was my work not included in chapter 6, "Blue Light Sutras: 1976–1989"? Had I not struggled enough? Why was my song not heard? The oversight was a reminder that anthologies are not just graveyards but a literary Middle Passage in which too many writers drown from invisibility or are thrown...