Todays Poet Robert Hayden Robert Hayden born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit Michigan was raised in a slum called Paradise Valley Haydens parents separated soon after his birth and he became the foster child of Sue Ellen ID: 462013
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Today’s PromptSlide2
Today’s Poet: Robert Hayden
Robert Hayden, born
Asa
Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan, was raised in a slum called Paradise Valley. Hayden's parents separated soon after his birth and he became the foster child of Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden. He earned his BA (1936) from Detroit City College, later renamed Wayne State University, and between 1936 and 1938 participated in the Detroit Federal Writer's Project. His studies with W.H. Auden at the University of Michigan, where he earned his MA (1944), had a profound impact on his poetry. After graduation he accepted a professorship at Fisk University in Nashville where he would remain for over twenty years. In 1969 he returned to teach at Michigan until his death. Hayden's early reading of Harlem Renaissance poets such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, combined with his study of the English classics, informed the precision and originality of his poetry throughout his life. As William Meredith states: "Robert Hayden was a man as gifted in humanity as he was in poetry. There is scarcely a line of his which is not identifiable as an experience of black America, but he would not relinquish the title of American writer for any narrower identity." Whether exploring an extended metaphor as in "The Diver" or drawing on the biography of Phyllis Wheatley, Hayden's poetry remains a distinct contribution to our literature. Slide3
Today’s Poem: Those Winter Sundays
Sundays
too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices? Slide4
Those Winter Sundays PerformedSlide5
Today’s Writing Challenge
Write
a poem about one of your parents or grandparents. Think about the work they do every day, and describe one of their seemingly simple routines—doing laundry, for example. Like Hayden, try to use as many sense images as you can: how does their task sound to you? When do they do it?
“Those Winter Sundays” alternates between very concrete images, like “cracked hands that ached from labor,” and more abstract ones, like “the chronic angers of that house.” Think about the effect of the two kinds of images—what do you picture when you read the final line of the poem, for example? Try writing a poem that uses both concrete and abstract images to describe an event you remember, either from the distant or more recent past.