Sam Cornish

• Comment: Sam Cornish looks to meet the notability requirements, but the article needs a bit more work to have it meet wiki's house style. At times it looks a little promotional. There are very few links to other wiki articles. The lead is not doing what it is meant to per WP:lede. The biography is lacking in citations. Etc. Etc.
  Take a look at e.g. Amanda Gorman for another article on an American poet, that does a much better job of sticking to wiki's style. Furius (talk) 01:40, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

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Samuel James Cornish (December 22, 1935 - August 20, 2018) was Boston’s first poet laureate.

Cornish was a native of Baltimore, Maryland, he lived his early life with his mother, grandmother, and older brother Herman in a small apartment on McCulloh Street in the Druid Hill section of West Baltimore. At that time, it was a primarily African-American neighborhood of low- and modest-income wage earners. He did not recall his father, who had evidently left or died soon after Sam’s birth. He wrote about this experience in his first book of poems:

It was the most natural thing being without a father. You just never saw him in the house. Suddenly you were in the world. No memories except you were moving around doing things. This is how it begins. It’s like you were always there, and he never was..

Biography and Publications

During the Depression-era economy, Sam’s mother Sarah supported the family by working mainly as a domestic, with seasonal work at the post office. As the brothers approached adolescence, she developed medical conditions that prevented her from doing physical labor, so the two brothers were obliged to find employment within the community. During his adolescence, Sam worked as a hospital orderly, a janitor, a clerk in a kosher deli and an insurance salesman. He graduated from the Henry Highland Garnet School in the Upton neighborhood and attended the Frederick Douglass High School but left after one semester at the age of 17 because he was uncomfortable socializing with children from more affluent families.

Despite his experience with public school, he developed keen interests in reading, writing and drawing. His brother Herman was an accumulator of “pulp” or “dime” novels but Sam widened those genres to include literature, history and philosophy. He took a few art classes and went to night school to further his education but had by then read so widely that he was bored by the classes regarded the instruction as condescending. He wrote about this experience:

In the 1950s, toward evening I walked downtown from my room in a boarding house on Druid Hill Avenue to the Enoch Pratt Free Library and sat in the reading rooms, browsing and reading volumes of the New York Times, Variety, The Saturday Review and Sight and Sound. I wandered through other departments to the literary criticism; I was in love with the contemporary American novel of realism.

I lived and slept in a basement with my head on a table with roommates who were young Negro college students. After that, I had a third-floor room in a boarding house in the back of an elegant row house with single retired or unmarried gentlemen with their cigars and pipes.

During the summer, the heat rose into my room so I spent most of my free time wandering the downtown or in the library, listening to music and radio plays. With the spare change left over from the rent, I bought books from the used bookstores and the New Era Bookstore, a left-wing bookshop a block from the library that made a little extra money selling the Daily Worker, a newspaper said to be the mouthpiece of the party, pamphlets and other books dealing with the exploitation of the workers. The library and this bookshop were my introduction to the city and the world of books. What had begun as a kid, sitting on a stool at the Pippens Bookshop on Eutaw Street, and then at the Frigate Bookstore on North Howard, where I discovered Simenon and Nelson Algren, was now a life for me.

However, as a low-income African American over 18, he became and was eminently eligible for the Selective Service, and in 1958 he was drafted into the army. After boot camp, he spent two years at Ft. Benning, Georgia, which he later regarded as a mainly positive experience because, he said, for the first time, he was able to have enough to eat and access to health care. Owing to fallen arches and extreme presbyopia, he was not a good candidate for military maneuvers so, after an unfortunate accident with a rifle, spent the remainder of his induction on K.P., peeling potatoes and then as an army medic. He later claimed that doing this undemanding work left him ample time to continue his reading. Years later, he was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun about this period:

Back in Baltimore he knocked around for awhile, doing odd jobs and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He was drawn to the civil rights movement, which was starting to rumble, and took part in the 1963 March on Washington. That experience inspired him to write a poem, which appeared soon after in a newsletter. "I was really excited," he says of his first published work. "It gave me the chance to bear witness to an important moment of history." In 1965 his first collection of verse, "In This Corner," was brought out in chapbook form by a small local press. Emboldened by this modest success, Mr. Cornish slipped a copy of the book under the door of the late Elliot Coleman, founder and for 30 years director of the Writing Seminar at the Johns Hopkins University. Coleman wrote back inviting him to sit in on his classes, and the two became friends. "Coleman had a lot to do with my wanting to go to college and to write and to be a poet," says Mr. Cornish. "I admired his standard of behavior. He was important to me as a man and as a role model." He also spent long hours in the literature room of the Enoch Pratt's Central Branch and became well-known to such figures as Richard H. Hart, then head of the library's literature and language division.

In his account however, Mr. Scarupa had a few inaccurate details. In This Corner was not Cornish’s first collection of poems. In 1962 under the auspices of a local leftist bookstore, he published a chapbook titled People Beneath the Window. According to Carrington Bonner, writing for Black Books Bulletin, “…there’s an old man at New Era Bookstore in downtown Baltimore who will tell you he has sold over 1,000 copies…” True or not, even a fraction of that number would be a phenomenal success for a first book of poems.By 1964, Sam Cornish had become active in the small press scene and his poems were appearing in various literary magazines. Through these publications, he was making contacts -- not only among poets but in the community of neighborhood activists and social workers. He formed associations with the Baltimore Multi-Service Center, a community-based organization, and with the Enoch Pratt Public Library, an affiliate, promoting not only his writing but the writing of others in the community, including writing by children. These ties would influence much of his professional life -- in teaching, writing and tutoring. At that time, there was increased interest in promoting the writings of inner-city youth and adults. In 1966, his efforts resulted in his first major publication, Chicory, an anthology of writings by children and adults that was published by the Association Press, a subsidiary of the YMCA. The Enoch Pratt Library currently features an article on the history of the magazine:

Chicory differed from a traditional literary magazine in several ways. It initially focused on writings by residents of the Baltimore community action target area in East Baltimore, an impoverished, predominantly African American neighborhood, though it would grow through neighborhood-based community centers to encompass the entire city. It published pieces with no editing and also published snippets of overheard conversations or poems told to one of the editors. It gave Baltimore’s poor communities an outlet for their thoughts and ideas. As the November 1969 issue proclaimed, “The purpose of this magazine is to publish work overheard by the editor which reflect the music of language in the inner city; to encourage more spoken and written comment by people in the community action area; and to inform those other people and agencies within the area of our ways of living.”

Chicory was very successful, and continued for some years after Cornish had settled in Boston. In fact, it has recently been featured in a book on Baltimore's history, including a chapter on the contributions of Sam Cornish was a firm believer in the rising tide lifting all boats and in that spirit, published and promoted the work of other poets as well as his own. The Baltimore Sun described him as: “…...a local poet who has become a sort of literary talent scout in the inner city. Mr. Cornish launched “Chicory,” a magazine devoted largely to impromptu writing by children; he edits “Mimeo,” a poetry magazine that attracts work from across the county; and he started “”Bean Bag,” a magazine sponsored by the Methodist Church’s “Operation Crowded Ways” project. Mimeo published such poets as Ruth Whitman, Ron Schreiber and Ottone Riccio…. Beanbag Press published chapbooks by, among others, Emmett Jarrett , Norman Hoegberg and William Doreski. In 1965, Cornish also self-published a chapbook titled Generations, which title he would re-use for his first commercially-published book of poems.

In 1968 he married Jean Faxon, a graduate student in social work at the University of Maryland. He was by then working for Baltimore’s Community Action Agency. She was from Lenox, Massachusetts, so they decided to move to Boston, where he found employment in two local bookstores. He would, however, return to Baltimore several times in the next few years. On one such visit, he apparently had some contretemps with personnel at the Lombard Junior High School and consequently believed he was “banned from Baltimore.” A subsequent article in the Evening Sun, “Come Home, Sam,” sought to clear up the mistake. The article describes him as a “teacher at the Highland Park Free School” in Roxbury, MA, although he was hired specifically as a curriculum specialist because of his work on Chicory and similar community-based involvements.

These credits also led to a similar job as an educational consultant and curriculum specialist for the Central Atlantic Regional Education Laboratory in Washington, DC, where his job involved designing reading materials for classroom use. That agency is currently an umbrella organization, sponsoring various programs. Under their auspices, he was hired as an educational advisor by the Education Development Center work with their Project Follow Through in Newton, MA:

Follow Through was the largest and most expensive experimental project in education funded by the U.S. federal government that has ever been conducted … originally intended to be an extension of the federal Head Start program....(for) typically disadvantaged preschool children and their families..

In this position, he created writing materials such as booklets and broadsides for primary school students, and advised their teachers about the open education project. He also traveled to Paterson, NJ, Philadelphia and Washington to provide parents and teachers with information about open education. An article In the News of Paterson New Jersey describes a workshop:

…the purpose of which was to orient the Paterson staff to the philosophy of the Education Development Center Follow Through Model... Sam Cornish, EDC of Boston Mass, was in charge of the creative writing sessions…

The job also afforded him his first real opportunity to travel and to pursue his interest in photography. During adolescence, he had developed an attraction to the American cinema, and often attended showings of just about any feature film at the neighborhood theaters. He was profoundly affected in particular by the lifestyles and manners depicted in the films of the 1940s and 1950s, and would have liked to become a director, but at that time, opportunities to pursue such an interest were extremely limited, particularly for someone of his background. At EDC, he photographed the communities to which he traveled, as well as the students and teachers with whom he worked. His employment with EDC Follow Through lasted through 1979.

By the late 1960s, he was settled in Massachusetts and connecting with the local poetry community did not take long. A flyer produced by the Harvard Advocate announcing a weekly poetry reading in Harvard Square on April 18 (1968) has an index card stapled to it: "Sam Cornish will be reading..." The flyer mentions Mimeo and his chapbook People Beneath the Window and that he worked in a local bookstore. Another small announcement in the Boston Globe states that he was reading with poet Ruth Whitman at the Arlington Street Church. Some of these connections made in Cambridge led to later publications. For example, in 1967 a chapbook entitled Winters was published by the Sans Souci Press and a broadside, The River, was printed by the Temple Bar Bookshop in 1969.

Working with children’s writing through Chicory and Follow Through inspired him to write a book for children. While at Follow Through, he had edited and published many booklets and broadsides of children’s writing as well as his own. His first commercially-published children’s book, Your Hand in Mine, was issued by Harcourt, Brace in 1970. It was well received and, according to Black World, “His excursion into the field of children’s stories is a gem…” This was followed in 1974 by Grandmother’s Pictures, described by the New York Daily News as “Possibly the first black Mother’s Day book ever written.” Grandmother’s Pictures, evocatively illustrated by Jeanne Johns, is not, strictly speaking, a book for children but rather an all-ages reminiscence in verse that the author described as a “disconnected mood picture.” Whatever its genre, Grandmother’s Pictures was perhaps one of his most successful books, as it was published in three editions by three different publishers. In 1976, Bradbury Press did a hardcover version and, in 1978, Avon published a mass market edition. Unfortunately, Grandmother’s Pictures was Sam Cornish’s last publication for the children’s book market. Industry rumors have claimed that a subsequent picture book, Walking the Streets With Mississippi John Hurt, was issued by Bradbury Press but there are no extant copies and the press was bought by Simon & Schuster, which claims no knowledge of the book.

Although Sam Cornish did not publish another book for children, he continued to publish books of poetry. In 1971 Beacon Press, the publishing division of the Universalist Unitarian Society with headquarters in Boston, issued his first full-length book of poems titled Generations. As previously mentioned, it was also the title of a chapbook he had self-published in 1967, although there is little similarity between the two beyond the title and one or two of the poems. The book-length Generations, unlike the chapbook, was the work of a more mature man, now in his mid-30s and contained topics and themes that he would revisit many times in his later work. It was a very promising start and, according to Clarence Major, “The poems are clear and sharp, with no excess fat." According to various reviewers over the course of his career, Sam Cornish would become known for his “perfect pitch” and “unerring sense of cadence,”. .

In 1978, Cornish decided to take a job in arts administration, with a position opening up for Literature Director at the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. By 1972, his marriage to Jean Faxon had dissolved and, in 1976, he married his second wife, Florella Orowan, and they remained married until his death in 2018. She was a bookseller and together, they opened a small bookstore, Fiction, Literature and the Arts, in the Boston suburb of Brookline. Cornish held the position at the Arts Council for only three years, although during that time, he advocated vigorously for small and literary presses to receive matching-grants funding. The arts council position was also invaluable in acquainting him with many writers and small press publishers throughout Massachusetts, a few of which later published some of his work.

One contact, which he had made earlier when he was a part of the literary scene in Harvard Square, was the publisher James Randall, co-founder of the Pym Randall Press and also chair of the Creative Writing Department at Emerson College in Boston. In 1973, the Pym Randall Press had published a chapbook of poems by Sam Cornish, and he had become friends with Randall, who offered him the position of Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College. That position lasted for only a year, although he remained in touch with Randall. Additionally, the bookstore was still in operation although it was primarily his wife’s business, so he supplemented his income by taking short-term consultancies and teaching assignments.

The Orange Line Project was one such consultancy. Under the auspices of UrbanArts, a funding agency, he was named Literature Program Coordinator and oversaw the installation of literary monuments at subway stations along the MBTA’s Orange Line. The project, called Arts in Transit, was funded by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and managed by UrbanArts. Sam Cornish’s role was typical of his approach to literature – that it be made more visible and accessible to the public. He would later follow this same model in his position of Boston Poet Laureate. The Orange Line project led to other related positions with UrbanArts, as well as some occasional teaching and consulting assignments.

Another sideline he pursued during that period was book reviewing. He became a fairly regular contributor to the Christian Science Monitor, reviewing numerous titles in African-American literature, mainstream American Literature, genre fiction and the literature and history of the American West. At the same time, the bookstore was publishing a book review magazine titled Fiction, Literature and the Arts Review, to which he was a frequent contributor. In 1984 he moderated a panel discussion at the Central Square Branch of the Cambridge Public Library on black writing, sponsored by the bookstore, which published a special issue of the magazine focusing on that topic. At the time, it was a relatively uncommon subject for panel discussions.

Another occupation he pursued throughout much of his life was part-time work in bookstores. Having been thus employed soon after his arrival in Boston, he continued this endeavor, partly in order to stay in touch with present publishing trends and occasionally, out of economic necessity. In his later years, it became a convenient place to meet his readers and supporters. In addition to his wife’s store, he worked at Avenue Victor Hugo in Boston, Paperback Booksmith in Cambridge and New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton, where he was still employed until a few months before his death.

Also during this same period, he began teaching part-time at Emerson College. He was hired to augment their curriculum on minority studies, so the first course he taught was titled Minority Visions. However, given his wide-ranging interests in American history and world literature, he expanded that over time to include courses on many literary genres. During his tenure at Emerson, he introduced and taught courses in the Harlem Renaissance, Jewish writers, Holocaust literature, literature of the American West, literature of World War II, gay literature and Irish writers, among others. In many ways, the period between 1982 and his eventual retirement in 2004 was the flowering and height of his career -- as a writer, teacher and scholar.

His second book of poems, Sam’s World, was published by Decatur House Ltd. in 1980 – a press owned by novelist Julia Markus and her then-husband, artist Frank DiFederico. In Black Books Bulletin, Carrington Bonner wrote that the poems “are clear images to the point of the themes, with perceptive acknowledgement of the dark beautiful/ugly realities of the inner city from which he came. Simplicity and sure hand are tools that are not easily contained by a poet. Sam’s World shows off these unique qualities.” In Callalloo, E. Ethelbert Miller wrote: “I was happy to discover that Sam’s world was real, not imaginary. It is one in which people occupy a major space.” Both reviewers were impressed that Cornish was not “seeking inner exile,” as poets tend to do, but rather writing about real world experience.

In 1985, Unicorn Press, a well-established publisher of poetry by both well-known and new poets, published Songs of Jubilee, a collection of new and selected poems. In the Acknowledgements, the writer lists various people from his personal history, although many of the poems deal with topics from African-American history: Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune, and other prominent African Americans. This approach, digging deeper into the history of both his local community and the larger African American population, would become the focus of his next three books.

1935

In 1990, a somewhat-experimental memoir was published by Ploughshares Books titled 1935 – the year that Cornish was born. A combination of prose and poetry, it loosely follows a timeline paralleling his life to that point. It was reviewed on NPR’s "All Things Considered" by Alan Cheuse:

1935 is a powerful collage of portraits of Baltimore ghetto street life, figures from Sam Cornish’s own family, of simple poems about growing up black and swatches of history and sociology. All of it makes for quite a striking and effective narrative rhythm.

Cheuse is appreciative of the historic details in this “..odd amalgam of ego and history, prose and poetry, hymns to Harlem and the deep South and the music of Ruth Brown and the courage of Martin Luther King and all kinds of shades of skin from black to brown to sepia to pink and back again. All of this contrives to give the feeling of the era. This innocent through dangerous world lurching toward World War II, and the sensuous tone of being black in Baltimore in 1935.”

Two years later, Sam Cornish struck up a relationship with Roland Pease, who under the auspices of his press Zoland Books, published two collections of poetry. The first one, Folks Like Me, was issued in 1992, and received a fair amount of attention from several periodicals. Choice magazine considered it a “powerful collection” and “highly recommended.” Library Journal notes the “wealth of history” contained in poems about Joe Louis, John Coltrane, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and recommended it for most collections. Additionally, Maya Angelou contributed a back cover blurb, comparing the book’s contents with the artistry of Ray Charles’ blues. The other book published by Zoland, Cross A Parted Sea, may have been more difficult for readers who had been attracted to the earlier, a more genial, Sam Cornish. The book is aptly titled, as these poems are darker and imply a parting of the waves — both in America and in his relationship with poetry. For one thing, the book is more profane than his earlier work, with frequent racial slurs and crude language. Cornish had begun to write in voices other than his own, and this may have caused his readers some confusion and discomfort. When reading these poems aloud, he would preface his performance with disarming comments apologizing for “using dirty words.” These poems are also based on historical subjects:

Cross a Parted Sea

In the Green

Pastures    God is a Negro

his cigars cost a dime

Heaven is a fish fry every day

where angels (wings pinned

to their white robes)    are singing

and even in heaven the catfish

bite & drinking peach wine

is the only sin my father knows… (from the title poem)

The mixture of folklore, cultural stereotypes and satire was a technique frequently used by Sam Cornish, as in his earlier poem from Generations:

Newscast

the national guard

is cleaning chicken

and pork chops

off the street

This is one example of what poet James Tate called the “poetry of an ice pick” in his jacket blurb for Folks Like Me.

The last book of poems by Sam Cornish that focused on African-American history was An Apron Full of Beans, published by CavanKerry Press in 2008. It was a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year finalist and finalist in the Milt Kessler Poetry Award for 2009. It was not widely reviewed, but Adam Tavel, writing for the Café Review had the following reaction:

Time and again in these poems, Sam Cornish trespasses the accepted borders between public history and private experience by evoking the voices of slaves, sharecroppers, and historical figures such as Frederick Douglass in one large cultural conversation that is self–sustaining without the added burden of arguing against Whitman’s vision of nationhood.

Tavel may have been reacting to the flap copy in comparing the book to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Although a lofty claim, the book might well be seen as a summing up of Cornish’s views on American history and in particular, African-American history. In fact, this book had sufficient impact, at least locally, such that Marshall Hughes, Theatre Director of Mainstage, Roxbury Community College in Boston, reworked it as a stage production and his troupe gave a number of performances of it around the Boston area. An Apron Full of Beans was not Sam Cornish’s only experiment with multimedia collaboration. A few years later, he performed on a regular basis with the Lemonshiners, a local bluegrass group. Their music proved a very suitable accompaniment to his poems about, in particular, the Civil War and the American West

Perhaps his most comprehensive multidisciplinary achievement was his final book of poems, Dead Beats. Published by Ibbetson Street Press in 2011, it includes 11 of his black-and-white photographs. In Dead Beats, he puts aside his focus on African-American and reclaims his generational identity with and affection for the Beats. Michael T. Steffen, writing for the Wilderness House Literary Review, commented on the “magic of joining words” that the title implies, but it is even more typically Sam Cornish’s inclination to remind the reader that these writers, often depicted as vital, larger-than-life personae, are now a part of history. On the jacket blurb, Martha Collins comments that “Cornish makes us feel the excitement of those times, even as he and his companions absorb the complex and often disturbing history of what he aptly calls “My Young America.”

Unlike his previous several books, in which he wrote about and echoed voices from the past or assumed other identities, in Dead Beats, Cornish returns to the first person and his own identity. The poem Dead Respectability, about the poet John Wieners, takes aim at poetry publishing and its readership: the poet / looking for cigarette butts / in the gutters of Common / wealth Avenue / is not a bum living alone on Joy / Street he’s John Wieners / his friends in poetry will speak well / of him after he’s dead… John Wieners was a frequent visitor at the Fiction, Literature & the Arts Bookstore in Brookline and Sam Cornish had considerable respect for his work, and so the poem grows increasingly personal as the writer confesses his identification with an outcast, as Wieners was viewed in his later years. With these poems, as well as a few others in this collection, Sam Cornish pays homage to some of the odd and unusual characters he knew who had provided him with poetic material.

Boston Poet Laureate

In 2008, Sam Cornish received perhaps the crowning achievement of his career as a poet. A committee of half a dozen individuals from various neighborhoods in Boston and diverse walks of life selected him among a fairly large group of applicants to be Boston’s first poet laureate. In the mission statement accompanying his application, he promised to focus on outreach and after assuming the post, he outlined his goals: “I try to be the person to bring a poem to people who might not read poetry, or those who want to talk to a poet about the craft.”). Indeed, he was fairly successful at that. An interdepartmental e-mail from the Mayor’s Office states that in the first year of his term as poet laureate, he “made over 40 appearances at schools, libraries, community centers, bookstores and other venues. Most of these appearances have been in workshop format. Mr. Cornish typically reads from his work, talks about his role as the poet laureate, and hears poetry from participants.” In addition, he was given an office at the Copley Square Branch of the Boston Public Library, where he held meetings and out of which he held classes and scheduled special events. He also represented the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Tourism at various public events and seasonal occasions at which once again, his objective was to bring poetry to a wider audience.

Poetic Influences and Style

By the time Generations was published, Sam Cornish had already begun to hone his poems to the bullet-point brevity of his later work. He addressed this in his biographical statement he submitted to Contemporary Poets: “I try to use a minimum of words to express the intended thought or feeling, with the effect being starkly frank at times.”

In a poem about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King (“Death of Dr. King,” 1971), Cornish depicted rage not in mounting cascades of language but in a devastating quick brushstroke: “we are mourning//our hands filled with bricks//a brother is dead.”

The poetry of Sam Cornish does not follow strict poetic form. In an interview with Boston Magazine, given shortly after he was elected Poet Laureate, he responded to the comment that his work was mainly free verse:

I believe that spoken language has its own qualities, and sometimes its own literary qualities. I think there’s an in-between where there’s truth. There’s a form to my work, but it has more to do with jazz and the Negro spiritual and the conversational tone of the Beats. .. The Beats sort of communicated better than any writers in my time …about what it is to be a person in a particular time and place.

When asked about the informal tone of his style, he replied:

I think what you do is you try to find the best means of bringing your voice to a reader. I’m not too sure that given my presence, and my manner, that I wouldn’t be a little pretentious or appear a little unreal if I was a more formal writer because I’m not that kind of a person.

Relationship to the Black Arts Movement

In some of the above-referenced biographical sources, Sam Cornish is identified as one of the poets of the Black Arts Movement – a politically-motivated literary movement of the 1970s that promoted African-American identity and solidarity. When asked about his relationship to those poets, he answered:

A lot of that (militancy) was directed at whites generally. It was confrontational or abrasive. You were now BLACK and different from previous generations. You had no patience with your forefathers, your parents, those who were living as NEGROES. It was a very angry and self-destructive ideology. People like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden were viewed as not being pro-black.

In another interview, when asked about his identity as a writer of protest literature, he replied that if he were, he would be protesting social currents relative to the literature of the Great Depression It is instructive to realize that, during the 1970s when the Black Arts Movement flourished, he was well into his thirties and somewhat older than many of the writers in the Black Arts Movement. His views on art and life had been formed by reading writers such as Georges Simenon, John P. Marquand and MacKinley Kantor, and poets such as William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Robert Penn Warren and, of course, Langston Hughes. Despite his criticism of some Black Arts Movement writers, however, he maintained cordial relations with Dudley Randall, founder of Broadside Press, and former US Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, who was one of the better-known authors of the press. As a poet, Sam Cornish did not view himself as part of any particular movement or style. He did, however, see himself as part of an artistic tradition. When responding to an interview question by poet Afaa M. Weaver regarding his heritage, he replied:

Before I was born, my mother was visited by the spirits of three men. One was a film composer, a Jewish émigré working in Hollywood or Warner Brothers. The second was an Irish-American novelist and the third was a Negro poet who was writing poems about blues, jazz and the Negro in history. They told her they were following a star that had stopped over the city of Baltimore.

Death

In late 2015, Sam Cornish was diagnosed with an hereditary cardiac amyloid condition. He lived with it for more than two years before succumbing to a major stroke in August of 2018, which event ended his life. He is buried at the National Cemetery in Bourne, MA.

Publications

Books

• Dead Beats (Ibbetson Street Press, 2011)
• An Apron Full of Beans (CavanKerry Press, 2008). Adapted for the stage as a play written and directed by Marshall Hughes and performed at various venues in the Boston area, 2012
• To Cross A Parted Sea (Zoland Books, 1996)                              
• Folks Like Me (Zoland Books, 1992)
• 1935–A Prose Memoir (Ploughshares Books, 1990)
• Songs of Jubilee–New & Selected Poems (Unicorn Press, 1985)
• Sam’s World–Poems (Decatur House, Ltd., 1980)
• Generations–Poems (Beacon Press, 1971)
• Grandmother’s Pictures (1974, 1976,1978) (Bookstore Press, Bradbury Press, Avon Books)
• Your Hand in Mine (Harcourt Brace, 1970)

Pamphlets/Chapbooks

• A Reason for Intrusion: Poems by Three Poets (Fleming-McAlister Press), 1972
• Angles (Self-published, no date). Dedicated to Eliott Coleman
• Sometimes (Pym Randall Press), 1973
• Generations (self-published), 1965
• Winters (Sans Souci Press), 1967
• In This Corner (Fleming-McAlister Press), 1964
• People Beneath the Window (Sacco Pub.), 1962/1965(?)
• Short Beers Beanbag Press, 1969 (n.d.)

Anthologies

Included in the following:

• American Literary Anthology (Viking Press)
• New Black Poetry (Wm. Morrow)
• Black Fire (Wm. Morrow)
• Drum Voices (Doubleday & Co.)
• New Voices in American Poetry (Winthrop Pub.)
• English for a New Generation (McGraw Hill)
• Memory of Kin (M.H. Washington, ed.) (Doubleday & Co.)
• Our Daily Bread (Kathleen Aguero, Ed.)
• Poetry Connection (Poets and Writers)
• The Poetry of Black America Arnold Adoff, Ed. (Harper & Row)
• You Better Believe It (Penguin Publishers)
• Daily Fare Kathleen Aguero, ed. (University of Georgia)
• An Ear to the Ground Harris & Aguero, Editors (University of Georgia)
• Beneath Another Sky (Scott Foresman)
• Generations Arnold Adoff, Editor (Follett)
• Men of Our Time Moramarco & Zolynas, Editors (University of Georgia Press)
• Crossing Boundaries (Mc Graw Hill)
• Rereading America (Bedford Books/St. Martins)
• African American Alphabet Hausman & Rodriques, Editors St. Martins
• The Garden Thrives Clarence Major, Editor (Harper Perennial)
• Reflections on A Slice Of Water Pickle (Scott Foresman)
• Pierced By A Ray Of Light (Harper & Row)
• Letters to America Jim Daniels, Editor (Wayne State University Press)
• Memory of Kin Mary Helen Washington, Editor (Doubleday & Co.)
• Christmas 1968: 14 Poets D.R. Wagner, Ed. (Black Rabbit Press)
• My Black Me: A Beginning book of Black Poetry Arnold Adoff, Ed. E.P. Dutton, 1994
• Contemporary Black Biography, Vol. 50 Sara and Tom Pendergast, Eds. (Thomson Gale)
• Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race Jim Daniels, Ed. (Wayne State University Press)
• The Living Underground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry Hugh Fox and Sam Cornish, Eds. (Ghost Dance Press)
• The Ploughshares Poetry Reader Joyce Peseroff, Ed. (Ploughshares Books)

Literary Periodicals

Cornish's poems have appeared in: Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Essence Magazine, Agni Review, Evergreen Review, University of Tampa Poetry Review, Black Poetry, Work, Obsidian, Greenfield Review, Ann Arbor Review, Camels Coming, Hiram Review, Grand Street Magazine, Hanging Loose

Editorships/Reviews

Editor, Chicory (periodical/book); Book Review Editor, Fiction, Literature & the Arts Review; Publisher/Editor, Mimeo Magazine and Beanbag Press; Guest Editor, Ploughshares, Ann Arbor Review; book reviews published in The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The West Coast Review of Books, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Boston Review, Essence Magazine, Fusion Magazine, Ploughshares, Harvard Book Review, Boston Review of Books.

As subject: critical article in Contemporary Literature, Fall/Winter 1992; extended review of book 1935 in Kenyon Review, Fall 1992; 1935 subject of review on “All Things Considered,” National Public Radio, 1991; Review of Cross A Parted Sea, Winter Issue, Boston Review of Books (1996). Review in Shenandoah (1973) for Generations; Review in Southern Humanities Review (1992) for 1935; Reviews in Publishers Weekly (various dates) for Grandmother's Pictures (several editions). Critical Study: Writing America Black by C. K. Doreski  (Oxford University Press

Grants/Awards

• St. Botolph Society Foundation Award, 1992 (NEA)
• Grant, Mass. Council on the Arts, (1990) “Mass Productions” – to write 1935.
• NEA Fellowship (1967)
• NEA Award (given to writers published in the American Literary Anthology)
• ALA Notable Book Citations (for Grandmother’s Pictures and Chicory)
• Provincetown Poetry Workshop (1997)

Posthumous Publications

• “A Crossing Guard of Poetry and Life by Bryan Marquard,” Boston Globe, August 20, 2018.
• Remembering Sam Cornish,” a six-part series of programs presented by the Cambridge libraries on his poems and photographs. Summer, 2019
• African-American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song Kevin Young, Ed. Library of America, 2020
• “In the High Cloudless Afternoon” Hanging Loose 111 Hanging Loose Press, 2020