In a 2023 interview, the New York Times asked two-time U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith to name poets she had gained a greater appreciation for over the course of her career. Smith named Essex Hemphill, a fixture in the Washington, D.C., arts scene and Black gay community of the 1980s whose work had long since gone out-of-print. “There really needs to be a reissue of Hemphill’s Ceremonies,” she said.
New Directions Publishing answered Smith’s plea last month with Love Is a Dangerous Word, edited by John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr. The collection brings Ceremonies back into print alongside a number of uncollected pieces pulled from the archives of such long-running publications as Obsidian, among others, spotlighting the work of a figure notable for his innovative and incendiary poetics and advocacy for Black LGBTQ+ and feminist art and activism.
The idea to reissue Hemphill’s works came to New Directions before that Smith interview, during a conversation between Faber US senior publicist Brittany Dennison, who was then at NDP, and Brett Fletcher Lauer, deputy director of the Poetry Society of America. Dennison asked Lauer which out-of-print collection he would be most excited to see back in the world; his response, Dennison said, was immediate. She took the idea back to her colleague, editor Declan Spring, and so the project began.
Ceremonies, a collection of poetry and essays, was first published by Plume, an imprint of Penguin Books, in 1992. (That same year, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his work coediting the 1991 anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men—a role he inherited after the 1988 death of its initial editor, fellow Black gay poet and activist Joseph Beam.) Paperback copies of the book are currently priced between $100 and $200 on the resell market, though scans of the book are freely available on the Internet Archive.
The choice to release a new volume rather than a standard reissue was rooted in the breadth of Hemphill’s archives. “There are people who were there when Ceremonies came out. They don’t need a new copy,” Dennison said. “I wanted a volume that could appeal to longtime fans of Hemphill’s work and also newcomers.”
This was not the first attempt to bring Hemphill’s work back into print. But Jade Wong-Baxter, the agent at Francis Goldin Literary who represents Hemphill’s estate, said that past efforts never quite gathered enough steam—in part because of the copious coordination required to get the project on track.
Securing rights wasn’t the issue. With Ceremonies out-of-print and much of Hemphill’s other poetry either self-published or collected in chapbooks put out by various defunct presses, the rights to the poems Hemphill had published in his lifetime had reverted to his estate, and his family quickly gave the project their blessing after a Zoom call with the NDP team. But actually collecting all the material was another matter. So the production continued for years, with help from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
“It’s a labor of love to bring something like this together,” Wong-Baxter said. “Essex really was a genius and deserved to be brought back into the spotlight, but the work in order to make that happen is often not that glamorous. It’s a lot of tiny moving pieces.”
Despite the unavailability of Ceremonies, Hempill’s work has had lasting power. Much of that, Keene believes, is due to the depth and rigor of his poetics: “I think some people will be surprised,” he said, by Hemphill’s range of references. “He’s reading African diasporic poets and thinking about work they’re doing—the idea of revolution in a broad sense and, of course, an immediate personal sense. It’s in dialogue with the writers of his generation, but also writers across time.”
Keene also attributes Hemphill’s continued reach to the availability of his work online. “I see references to Essex popping up on Instagram. Social media and blogging certainly played a key role in keeping his writing alive,” he said. Meanwhile, Hemphill’s filmography—he was featured in several documentaries between 1989 and 1992—remains accessible via various streaming services.
Keene and Reid-Pharr see the decentralized circulation of Hemphill’s work online, however modern, as a continuation of the poet’s DIY legacy, dovetailing with the grassroots audience development he engaged in during his lifetime. When Reid-Pharr first met Hemphill, in 1985, he had yet to publish a book but was putting out chapbooks himself while working at a D.C. print shop. “He was building those chapbooks himself,” Reid-Pharr said. “Secretly, from paper stock and materials that were at that shop.”
Reid-Pharr noted how young the readers of Hemphill he knows were when he met them, and suggested that the “hand-to-hand” circulation of his poetry perpetuated that ever-elusive publicity goal for any book: word of mouth. He first encountered Essex “as a poet, but also as a performer,” noting the influence of such artists as the Last Poets, a poetry collective and musical group formed in the late 1960s, on his work.
Like the Last Poets, Reid-Pharr explained, Hemphill believed in a “revolutionary, nationalist” idea of poetry as community and politics: “He was building an audience, and not simply through publications.”
Keene agreed: “It’s a different sort of approach to getting your work in the world—sharing your work by building literary communities for the future.”
Love Is a Dangerous Word features an image of its author on the cover—a somewhat rare decision, but one Dennison said that, after some pondering, felt “appropriate” in the context of his work. “He was very much a poet of the body. He wrote so much about physicality, about what he looked like, what people around him looked like,” she said. “That photograph is so representative, too, of the work: his gaze staring back at you. It’s this very intimate, open, honest, unflinching gaze—which is what the poetry is, too.”
