SOURCE: Zamir, Shamoon. “Artist as Prophet, Priest, and Gunslinger: Ishmael Reed's ‘Cowboy in the Boat of Ra.’” Callaloo 17, no. 4 (fall 1994): 1205-35.

In the following essay, Zamir delineates the major thematic concerns and influences behind Reed's seminal poem “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra.”

I

In 1963 Reed published “Time and the Eagle,” a somber poetic meditation on the burden of history upon the Afro-American people. Its studied and effected sense of tragedy and pathos make the poem unique in Reed's published oeuvre, a body of work almost entirely satiric in nature. While Reed's exclusion of this poem from his collected poetry rightly acknowledges its status as apprentice work, “Time and the Eagle” provides an invaluable point of departure for understanding Reed's poetic development. This development can be charted as a radical shift in the relationship of self to history and as a struggle between passivity and...