Gloria Oden

Gloria Catherine Oden (October 30, 1923 – December 16, 2011) was an American poet, editor and retired professor of English. She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for Resurrections, a collection of poems that responded to the unsolved murder of her mother and sister in their home in Washington, D.C.

Early life and education

Gloria Oden was born in Yonkers, New York, on October 30, 1923. As the youngest daughter of six born to an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church minister and a college-educated mother, Oden was instilled early on with a respect for education and intellect – she, along with her siblings were required to memorize and recite poetry. Additionally, her early religious training with Protestant rituals and hymns introduced her at a young age to the structures and rhymes of poetry, causing her professor (Carroll L. Miller) to describe her as a "Black Puritan" and a critical little "Blue Stocking". Oden's childhood was also influenced by estrangement from her siblings and parents due to an eight-year gap in age from her next closest sibling.

At the same time Oden expressed a close attachment to her father's congregation. It is from this congregation, which she describes as being composed of every economic and physical spectrum from the "chalk-faced, blond-haired, blue-eyed black boy" to the "serpent-eyed, ebony-hued girl," that she learned to disregard color.

Poetry

Gloria Oden began writing poetry at an early age, from first grade on through college and law school. She self-published her first book of poetry, The Naked Frame, a collection of love poems and sonnets in 1952 after reading an article by Mark Van Doren in The New York Times in which he wrote "that a poet needs to put his work out before the public to find out how much of a poet he was." This is clear, for example, from "iii":

Do you consider, when on me thoughts rest, The turmoil of this soul; the needing known, Within my heart where fierce winds crumble stone, To feel your body's weight my length abreast? When such pause comes, have you, perchance, then guessed The fury of Desire's madding tongue. That lashes this frail fresh still, yet unstrung From recent onslaughts of its parapets? How heavily upon my nipples lain Has yearning for the fullness of your lips; And for the absence of your touch, bleak pain? If with such things thought has not come to grips, I pray a shaft of light implode your brain Before to some perversion this love slips.

The Naked Frame received a favorable review from J. Saunders Redding in the Afro-American (Baltimore). Around that same time, Oden was introduced to the work of Richard Wilbur and joined a small group studying with Kimon Friar including James Merrill. This was Oden's first experience with a community of writers: "I was amazed as I did not know of any young people writing poetry," she recalls. The book was positively reviewed by the critic Jascha Kessler who wrote

It is simply wonderful, I think, that Gloria Oden praises life and love in poems interwoven with an oppressive past, a past made the more oppressive by the burden of the double murder of the two women most import in her life ... I hope that her book, Resurrections, may come to be better known, and not simply obscured and lost among the many books coming out of the small press publishing these days.

Oden's third book, The Ties that Bind (1980), is a memorial to her father and serves as a testament to his impact on her life, as the introductory poem narrates:

With childhood's eye I see him: Enthroned upon his pulpit, he sits Between his deacons in Pentecostal trinity; in the sober elegance of serge, With childhood's ear I hear him: Whether resonant with God's message or lining out the common meter of a hymn, he voices our resolve to forsake this world of glittering seduction for the untarnishing treasure what is to come.

Written twenty-five years after his death and dedicated to the "Black" church, the slender book's eight hymn-like poems are organized by days of the week. Starting on "Every Monday," when "Father took/ the train to New York City" she follows her father's methodical schedule, as he devotes particular days to maintenance of the buildings, visiting the sick, attending meetings, hosting church events as well as presiding at services where she ends on Sunday.

Oden's fourth book Appearances, published in 2004 at the age of 81, is by far her most ambitious work both in length (numbering almost 90 poems and over 200 pages) and in content. Doing away with much of her more formal or metered style of the past these poems vary in form and length, employing a great deal of free verse. While the majority of the poems are intensely personal (for which she expresses unease: "It discomfits me /that I should be the central / matter of my poems when savage and / brutal deeds hurl themselves /as headlines around the world"), Oden also engages with other poets such as Ciardi, Tennyson and T. S. Eliot while exploring a number of philosophical questions raised in the writings of Plato, Santayana, Spinoza, and Martha Nussbaum. In these poems, she considers the relationship between reason and emotion, and the connection of the body to the mind, often siding with feeling and imagination while stilling insisting that action ultimately rules over the page.

Even within her focus on the personal, like in the earlier collections, in Appearances, Oden investigates a wider range of topics from family, love, aging, happiness, and sexual passion. As the title would suggest, there is also a newfound openness in these verses, a shedding of past experiences. For example, while Oden makes clear her respect for her father, she also expresses some relief in his death which allowed her both to escape a bad marriage and to write freely: "It well may be I'm not/ much of one now but,/ safely, I can say/ had Father not died/ when he did, it/ is unlikely I/ would be the poet I/ regard myself today." These verses also show her coming to terms with a quite literal meaning of appearance, as it was clear that Oden did not live up to her mothers' expectations. Instead it is through poetry that she finds some sort of confidence as a result, fearlessly declaring: "The woman my husband chose/ not to marry explicitly/ informed me I was not/ very attractive. If/ she thought that was news,/ she was foolishly mistaken" ("A Small Step"). The overriding theme of Appearances, however, is sexual passion, as Oden juxtaposes a loveless first marriage with a content and largely passionless second marriage, to a sudden romance with a younger man, to whom she declares "you / inhabit me like smoke / in a house on fire;" ("Query"). It is a collection that hides nothing.

Most recently (March 2011) Gloria Oden published Homage which she describes as a praise song for the small black churches across America at slavery's end, congregations earnest in their pursuit of the rights and privileges of democracy, of which Memorial AMEZ of Yonkers was an example. Three poems were published in Inertia Magazine in 2008. Since 1996, when she retired from UMBC, she has been living in Catonsville, Maryland. Marianne Moore was another source of early encouragement. According to Oden: "The first thing she did was to feed me a sandwich of cream cheese and have me drink a glass of milk because I looked a bit thin to her. Then she took me piece by piece through everything I had handed in and critiqued. She had read it all before hand and when I left she gave me several legal-size yellow-lined pages of her criticisms bearing at the top 'Full of merit; threatened by trifles.' Joy!" It was also Moore her got Oden to stop signing her poems G.C. Oden, which she initially did because of prejudice against female poets. Nevertheless, as critic Doreski points out, Oden's concern with poetry not just as a vehicle for protest but as an art form meaningful to all, "places her well within the formalist tradition of Countee Cullen and Elizabeth Bishop." Her view, expressed in the unpublished essay "Negritude, So What!" (sent to Langston Hughes in a 1965 letter), that "The Negro in the United States is not African. He is American," nevertheless, was important to how she saw her poetry. As she expresses below, Oden could never forget she was black, but because she was black she saw her responsibility to reach all Americans as even greater:

Being both artist and Negro is no easy thing in the United States. Usually the Negro straddles two worlds. First, obviously, the Negro world into which he is born. More than likely the second world – the one in which he works – will be white. There is a very important third world, however, and integrated world made up of white and non-white participants in a racial dialogue. Burdensom or not, fair or not, I believe it is a particular responsibility of the Negro artists to make the most of this third world, not be wringing from their white opposites admissions of inherited guilt, inferiority, or whetever admissions years of anger and guish have bred in him, but by working with them to give major dimension and substance to an image of American which must encompass the contributions of all the various racial and religious groups that are joined on this continent.