Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, June 27th, 2004.

And it is the birthday of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, was born to two former slaves in the year 1872,

and became the first truly successful and influential black poet in American

literature.

Not only did he write poems, but a bevy of novels, short stories, essays, etc.

And in many ways, he was the chief influence of later poets like Langston Hughes and others of the

Harlem Renaissance movement. Paul Lawrence Dunbar was living and writing at a pivotal time in the

nation's history, in mankind's history, and he has just this lovely

combination of joy and mirth in some of his poetry and some of his verse, but also gravity

inherent in being the kind of man he was and living when he was.

But in all of that, this remarkable candor that comes through in today's poem,

though there's a bit of wit there too.

There's something serious undergirding the poem and just enough joviality to to take the edge off and make the shot

land or hit home, as it were, get past the defenses before you realize what it is your

contemplating and feeling.

I'll read it just once today,

but here is Paul Lawrence Dunbar's The Lawyers' Ways.

As you read or as you listen and as I read and after and contemplate just what it is that Paul Lawrence Dunbar is getting at here, this idea that rhetoric of all kinds, lawyers, not being the special exception here,

although there is something particular about lawyers to this day.

But the idea that if you hear two accounts of a man,

it's possible that neither one is the complete truth and that maybe there's a mean somewhere

...