Poet ray durem biography
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Ray Durem was born in in Seattle, WA. Being light skinned, he was not often identified as African American in documents from the war period. Later in his life, however, he identified as Black and became involved with the Black Power movement.
The photo shows Rebecca Schulman, Durem, and their daughter, Dolores.
In a profile, Durem was reported to have left home at 14 and joined the Navy. He was discharged due to a leg injury, and then worked various manual jobs to get by. He eventually enrolled at the University of California Berkeley.
Durem joined the Communist Party in and participated in pickets and other direct actions. He left for Spain in March of He was wounded at Brunete, complicating his injury from his Navy days, and had to be sent to Villa Paz Hospital to recover.
At Villa Paz, Durem met his first wife, Rebecca Schulman, a volunteer nurse from Brooklyn. When the hospital was evacuated in the summer of , Durem returned to the XVth Brigade and served throughout
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Durem, Ramen
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Born to mixed-race parents in Seattle, Washington, Ramón Durem () came to poetry relatively late in life while living in Mexico, his escape from the front lines of the Cold War. Before his witty and strident verse, written under the Anglicized name of Ray, attracted the attention of Langston Hughes, Durem had joined the Communist Party, volunteered for the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War, and worked as a union organizer in Los Angeles. In poems such as “I Know I’m Not Sufficiently Obscure” ()—“I know I’m not sufficiently obscure / to please the critics—nor devious enough. / Imagery escapes me. / I cannot find those mild and gracious words / to clothe the carnage”—Durem pled for the reunion of modern poetry and honest protest. His case impressed the Black Arts movement, which discovered him as a sympathetic elder and canonized him in Dudley Randall’s anthology The Black Poets (). One of Randall’s selections from Durem, “Award (A Gold Watch to the FBI Man Who has Followe