Essex Hemphill (1957-95) was a poet from Washington, DC. His poetry, first published in the 1980s, has had a recent resurgence with the publication of Love is a Dangerous Word. Hemphill’s unique, raw, and complex poems offer new vistas into the racial, sexual, and political landscapes of the AIDS crisis.
Hemphill was born in Chicago, but his family moved to Anacostia, a neighborhood in SW Washington, DC. Early influences were Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. In Washington he became a feature of an artistic scene that included performance, visual, music-poetry collaborations, and literary arts. This was a regional part of the broader Black Arts Movement. “Ours should be a vision willing to exceed all that attempts to confine and intimidate us,” Hemphill said. Hemphill died of AIDS in 1995 when he was 38.
Hemphill’s poems were elegiac, and sometimes memorialized the speakers’ own self-destructive impulses. The first person I in his poems is sometimes a lyric voice, a voice of authority, a character, or an autobiographical fragment.
“Object Lessons” contains many of the threads in his poems, the vulnerability and serrated edge mixed with pathos and defiance.
Hemphill preferred straightforward diction, clear syntax, and direct address rather than expressionistic pyrotechnics. But he had mastered the delicacy of exposure, of pressing the exact right point inside the person speaking to get to something tender and exposed.
His subjects, too, demanded the vulnerable uncovering that feels almost metabolic, seeping from his skin.
