THOMAS LARSON

(Richard Wright: Myths & Realities edited by C. James Trotman. Garland Publishing, 1988)

"The Political Vision of Afro-American Culture: Richard Wright's 'Bright and Morning Star'"

Richard Wright wrote Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of essays, stories, and novellas, in the late 1930s when he was an active member of the Communist Party of the United States.

The rest of this essay can be read as a PDF here.

(Perspectives of New Music. Double issue: Fall-Winter, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1981; Spring-Summer, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1982)

This essay started out of a desire to experience my own convergence with the music and writings of Charles Ives and the esthetics and poetry of Charles Olson. What began as a measure of my relationship with them became their relationship, in something larger, with each other. Furthermore, the same experience has always been counterpointed in my own work as a composer and writer. The legacy of the arts as being separable, by virtue of their expressive content, audience, differing perceptive modes, etc., has seemed to me to be an illusion propagated by some traditional casting of identity, of what art-forms "say."

How one form can say something, or one thing, better than another, the economic argument of the efficiency of art mediums. I feel that the genesis and experience of music and language are inseparable, if one can get beyond, if one can unanswer, the questions they supposedly address, to the exclusion of each other. They indeed converge in essence.

This essay, perhaps my first significantly original work, is available as a PDF download here.

(Flash Nonfiction, January 1972)

Up the ramp, the radio’s on, we view round for lights and the lights remain and let us in.

Look at us, driving the Interstate, driving the flat curve of the earth.

Look at us, leaving the city, heading west through the state, into the Horse-Trader’s dialect.

Look over us, mamamotormobile, for we’re going home with high beams on in the frozen hare’s eyes.

We’re going home with the tire wheel grazing low, the steering wheel grazing lower and tickling our tired waists.