Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin

by Janice N. Harrington

Overview

A lyrical and biographical reflection on the art and life of Horace H. Pippin—the best-known African American artist of his time—Primitive offers a searching critique of the condescension to African American folk art as supposedly “primitive,” and it also critiques the underestimation of African American life and imagination in the broader American consciousness. Award-winning poet Janice N. Harrington connects readers to this fascinating, odds-defying artist, all while underscoring the human craving for artistic expression.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683209
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children's books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the author of The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (BOA Editions, 2011). Her children's books, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (2007) and Going North (2004), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, have won many awards and citations, including a listing among TIME Magazine's top 10 children's books of 2007 and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library in 2005. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry. Harrington's poetry appears regularly in American literary magazines. She has worked as a public librarian and as a professional storyteller, performing at festivals around the country, including the National Storytelling Festival. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Table of Contents

I Now Why Do I Want to Get Up So High 1
Picture of the Poet and Horace H. Pippin Before the Perigee2

II If a Man Knows Nothing But Hard Times 3
A Primitive Portrait 4


III I’ve Seen Men Die 6
Like This, Like That 7
Night March, 369th Infantry 8
A Canel 9
Finding the Words 10
Shrapnel 11
The Speller 12
Form and Shapes 13
Fire 16
Hard 17
Horace Pippin’s Red 18


IV War Brought Out All the Art in Me 20
Tell My Heart 21
Losing the Way, 1930 22
Prophet 23
Surface Decoration 24
The Subtlety of Blue 25


V You Have Requested an Explanation of the Picturr 26
Domino Players, 1943 27
The Satisfactions of a Limited View 28
Topoanalysis 29
Victorian Interior, 1945 31
1939 32
The Trapper Returning Home, 1941 33
Lilies, 1941 34
In a Painted Room 35
Why, Oh Why, the Doily? 36
White Flesh 41
The Warped Table, a Still Life, 1940 42
Birmingham Meeting House 43
Harmonizing 44
Contemplation, the Art of 46
Newly Discovered Portrait of America’s First Black President 48
by Horace H. Pippin (1888-1946)


VI Now I Know How You Feel Alone 49
Erotica 50
Definitions 51
Commitment 54
My Wife Is Not Home at This Time 55


VII Then a Hand Lightly Layed on Me. Then a Still Voice 56
Blessing 57


Notes 58
Acknowledgements 64

Editorial Reviews

09/19/2016
Poet and children’s author Harrington (The Hands of Strangers) pays tribute to African-American painter Horace Pippin (1888–1946), presenting ekphrastic poems about the painter’s work alongside historical insights into his aesthetic choices and his journals. Pippin, a WWI veteran, began painting to work through trauma, depression, and a wounded right arm. Harrington highlights the war’s impact on Pippin’s work, particularly in the poems “Horace Pippin’s Red” and “Tell My Heart”: “Watch closely: A wounded vet, Negro doughboy,/ coddles a hog-bristle brush dipped in leftover house paint.” Several poems, including “A Canel” (meaning candle) and “Finding the Words,” borrow lines and brief passages from Pippin’s journals. “You called it teribell grond of sarro,” Harrington writes, “spelled/ so that we hear the voices ringing with terror.” The artist’s own words lend poignancy to the poems and underscore the sense of dread that haunts his images. This collection not only recalls specific paintings by Pippin but returns to the ideas of satisfaction emerging in the process of painting, and painting exactly what he saw. These two recurring ideas lend weight to his experiences as a veteran during the Jim Crow era. Harrington gracefully honors Pippin’s words and work through her spare lines, strong sense of narrative, and subtle sonic repetitions. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

“In her innovative and incisive third book of poems, Primitive, Janice N. Harrington shows us the great revelations possible in the intersections of history and poetry. These elegantly-crafted poems explore the aftermath of war, Jim Crow America, and American visual art through the life and art of the painter Horace H. Pippin. This collection is both a historical reflection and an ekphrastic object, masterfully rendered from found texts, paintings, notebooks, and the ephemera surrounding the painter and his work. It is through Pippin’s pictures and pigments, both paint and skin, that we see the complex beauty of the artist—a beauty that announces itself in bold colors in spite of the bigger machines of oppression that so often worked in opposition to his artistry.”

—Adrian Matejka

“In Primitive, the artist Horace H. Pippin is less a lens and more a prism through which Janice N. Harrington watches humanity with a careful eye. Harrington’s skill with image is undeniable, and her ability to intertwine ekphrasis, biography, history, and interior landscape results in a text that is much more than a book of poems without ever ceasing to be a moving and radiant example of one.”

—Jamaal May

"This collection not only recalls specific paintings by Pippin but returns to the ideas of satisfaction emerging in the process of painting, and painting exactly what he saw. These two recurring ideas lend weight to his experiences as a veteran during the Jim Crow era. Harrington gracefully honors Pippin’s words and work through her spare lines, strong sense of narrative, and subtle sonic repetitions."

— Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

10/15/2016
Early in her finely wrought new collection, a biographical and aesthetic study of African American painter Horace H. Pippin (1888–1946), Poulin and Kate Tufts honoree Harrington muses, "A Negro 'primitive' paints a self-portrait. But how?/ What new freedom allows him to see, allows the art?" She proceeds to answer that question in forthright, muscular verse that ranges through Pippin's life, from his World War I service to his triumphs and setbacks as a significant artist at a time when lynchings were common. Like a good painter, Harrington offers precise, grounded details, but she lets her poetry range widely. VERDICT "What cripples—the wound or the scar? The can't or the/ can't no more?" Harrington makes all readers wonder.

Library Journal