Poetry
James DePreist, one of the first African American conductors to achieve international renown, was also an accomplished poet, publishing two volumes of poetry: This Precipice Garden (1989) and The Distant Siren (1986). Read selected poems here, as well as Maya Angelou’s and William Stafford’s praise for Jimmy’s resonant verse.
Afterword from This Precipice Garden
by William Stafford
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INNER JOURNEYS, OUTER BALANCES
Art knows more than we do. Set free to exercise itself on its material, the art impulse will explore those hidden connections that lurk in the mystery around us.
In original and unexpected ways the poems of James DePreist demonstrate that power of discovery; they provide a bonus by being accomplishments of a gifted musician working in another medium. And the poems taken together reveal an intricate balance essential but disguised in a symphony conductor’s social role.
Poised before his Oregon Symphony, ready to follow a score with fidelity but also with the instant adjustments required of him, James DePreist commands attention. He gives off confidence; all is in control. But how vigilant must be the self that is to thread the complexity to come. By an inner light the guide must find the way.
When he turns to the different rhythm of his poems, it is as if James DePreist puts that hovering attention to a parallel task; again the inner light finds which way to go amid infinite, shifting possibilities. Here, however, there is a record in language of the course taken. The reader can follow in slow motion and see how the self proceeds along a tangled path. There are half-choices, retreats, the acceptance of shadows. Doubt is part of the process; self-questioning is constant; any assertion is a giving up of glimpsed alternatives. The very weakness of human perception helps provide the genius of its onward discovery. And the wavering self reaches out for help, for love, for understanding of others.
These poems become a human document, a generous sharing by a person for whom life always offers a shimmer of choices. Wildly experimental in places, the lines make way for agile metaphors (a pastel blizzard goes by); many of the lines happen in the implied presence of some higher rationale that could spring clearly into consciousness at any moment. A bigger story than our human story touches these poems.
As we read, for any of us there could exist multiple lives and insights we have allowed to slip past us. By sharing what comes to him when the rhythm of words bears him along, James DePreist offers these glimpses. We are present in that creative instant when a lift of the hand may invite a new sound—and perhaps a new life—to begin.
William Stafford
Lake Oswego, Oregon
July 1986