About 50 Prairie View students and faculty attended a Paul Laurence Dunbar presentation by professor Herbert Woodward Martin, professor of English at the University of Dayton, on Nov. 9 at Texas A&M University. The event featured energetic poetry readings, Negro spirituals and details about the life of Dunbar. Martin, one of the foremost Dunbar scholars, recited six of Dunbar’s poems accompanied by integrated Negro spirituals.
He also read two of his own poems, and a poem that he improvised using words provided by the audience. Students were amazed at Martin’s ability to make sudden switches from singing to speaking without long pauses or breaking character.
Sophomore Jamie Jackson said, “He was amazing, he just did his thing.” Martin also described what initially sparked his interest in Dunbar’s work. “The way he was able to express humanity, and the way he can just pull it out of the fire,” Martin said.
Martin explained why he himself became a poet and why he believes poetry is so important to humanity. “We expect poets to be prophetic when we are hurting, we expect them to have the right words to say that will make us feel better,” Martin said. Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872 and was the first black American poet to garner national critical acclaim.
Dunbar penned a large body of dialect poems, standard English poems, essays, novels and short stories before he died at the age of 33 from tuberculosis.
Martin expressed his profound interest in Dunbar’s work saying “he died so young, imagine what he could have done if he had lived longer.