Wrestling with the Muse

Dudley Randall, one of the great success stories of American small-press history, was also Poet Laureate of Detroit, a civil-rights activist, and a force in the Black Arts Movement. Melba Joyce Boyd was an editor at Broadside, was Randall's friend and colleague for twenty-eight years, and became his authorized biographer. Her book is an account of the interconnections between urban and labor politics in Detroit and the broader struggles of black America before and during the Civil Rights era.

And as I groped in darkness

and felt the pain of millions,

gradually, like day driving night across the continent,

I saw dawn upon them like the sun a vision.

—Dudley Randall, from "Roses and Revolutions"

In 1963, the African American poet Dudley Randall (1914–2000) wrote "The Ballad of Birmingham" in response to the bombing of a church in Alabama that killed four young black girls, and "Dressed All in Pink," about the assassination of President Kennedy. When both were set to music by folk singer Jerry Moore in 1965, Randall published them as broadsides. Thus was born the Broadside Press, whose popular chapbooks opened the canon of American literature to the works of African American writers.

Dudley Randall, one of the great success stories of American small-press history, was also poet laureate of Detroit, a civil-rights activist, and a force in the Black Arts Movement. Melba Joyce Boyd was an editor at Broadside, was Randall's friend and colleague for twenty-eight years, and became his authorized biographer. Her book is an account of the interconnections between urban and labor politics in Detroit and the broader struggles of black America before and during the Civil Rights era. But also, through Randall's poetry and sixteen years of interviews, the narrative is a multipart dialogue between poets, Randall, the author, and the history of American letters itself, and it affords unique insights into the life and work of this crucial figure.

Melba Joyce Boyd is professor of Africana studies at Wayne State University and adjunct professor at the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of six books of poetry, including The Province of Literary Cats, co-editor of Abandoned Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001, author of Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911, and the producer and director of the documentary film, The Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall and Broadside Press.

Jonathan Scott:
A serious, delightful and unpredictable exursion into the vibrant and volatile social life of Detroit.

James Edward Smethurst, University of Massachusetts:
This is an indispensable book for anyone interested in American intellectual and cultural history during the second half of the twentieth century, as it recalls the work of an accomplished poet largely missing from contemporary anthologies and convincingly recounts the development and impact of a crucial cultural institution of the black arts-black power era.

Kim D. Hunter:
Muse integrates aesthetics and politics with the vividness of an eyewitness and the conscience of a good journalist.

W. Kim Heron:
her book is an engaging and important contribution.. taking its place alongside the autobiographies of Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka and too few others

Boyd provides an intimate and critical examination...along with a valuable study of many of the personal, politcal, and institutional bases of mid-20th-century African American Poetry...Highly recommended.

[Wrestling with the Muse]... is a memoir within a memoir capturing not only the life of Randall, one of the greatest success stories in American small press history, but also the history of a turbulent century rife with racial injustice and discrimination.

Boyd celebrates the life and times of African-American poet Dudley Randall in Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press.... Boyd's sensitive portrait introduces us to a colleague many of us never had the opportunity to know.

Boyd has penned this definitive biography and celebration of [Randall's] poetry.

Anne Martino:
This is an imaginative work illuminating the life and influence of African American poet and publisher Dudley Randall.

As his one-time assistant editor and literary executor, poet and professor Melba Joyce Boyd is uniquely qualified to tell the story of Detroit's late poet laureate.

WhileWrestling with the Muse is clearly an homage [to Dudley Randall], it doesn't slip into sentimentality or fluff.