Sherry Chandler » Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.
Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.
From James Robert Payne’s introduction to Complete Poems of Joseph Seamon Cotter (University of Georgia Press, 1990):
Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., was born September 2, 1895, in Louisville, Kentucky, one of three children born to Maria E Cotter, née Cox, and Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr. Both parents were members of the Louisville educational community. Before her marriage, Maria Cox served as teacher and principal, and the senior Cotter had a distinguished career as teacher, principal, and poet. Joseph Cotter, Sr., had been a precocious child who learned to read at the age of three, benefitting from the stimulation of a mother who had the gifts, according to her son, of “a poet, storyteller, a maker of plays. …Cotter Sr. was principal of the Louisville school named for his friend Paul Laurence Dunbar at the time of Cotter Jr.’s birth, and by then the family was relatively well off and in their own home at 2306 Magazine Street in Louisville. Propitiously, the younger Cotter was born at home in the very room in which, on Thanksgiving of the year before, Dunbar had read his poems at a family party. As Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr., later proudly recorded: “Here for the first time in the South he [Dunbar] read the Negro dialect poems that afterwards made him famous.” Although the younger Cotter would completely eschew the dialect style that we see in much of Dunbar’s and the senior Cotter’s work, the circumstances of the young Cotter’s birth were auspicious. The young man was born into a strong family tradition of poetry traceable at least to his father’s mother and highlighted by his father’s literary achievements and the family friendship with Dunbar, one of the most highly regarded poets of his day.
Cotter graduated from Central High School with honors at fifteen, and entered Fisk University in the fall of 1911. During his second year, both he and his older sister Florence, who was also at Fisk, contracted tuberculosis. Florence died on December 16, 1914. the father wrote that it was the son’s intense grief over the death of his sister that “discovered to him his poetic talent.” Fighting illness and grief and unable to return to college, Cotter went to work for the Louisville Leader. He published a poetry collection, Band of Gideon and Other Lyrics, in June 1918 and was at work on a sonnet sequence, “Out of the Shadows,” when he died on February 3, 1919.
Rain Music
On the dusty earth-drum
Beats the falling rain;
Now a whispered murmur,
Now a louder strain.
Slender, silvery drumsticks,
On an ancient drum,
Beat the mellow music
Bidding life to come.
Chords of earth awakened,
Notes of greening spring,
Rise and fall triumphant
Over every thing.
Slender, silvery drumsticks
Beat the long tatoo—
God the Great Musician
Calling life anew.
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