Beyond "Circus": Remembering James Patterson (1933-2025) as a Poet

Olga Nechaeva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I am a griot,” declares the speaker of a 1973 poem by James Lloydovich Patterson:

The poem continues through a series of identifications. The speaker imagines himself as Gabriel Kalumba Tshung Manu, a Congolese metal artist; as Miriam Makeba, the South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist; as Bernard Dadié, the Ivorian novelist and poet; as a dancer from the Teke people; and as a woodcarver from Burundi. By the end of the poem, he is no longer only a single lyric “I.” He has become “the soul of the people.”

But which people? The poem’s immediate context points toward Africa and the diaspora. In Patterson’s Russian-language Soviet idiom, the lines also evoke the collective language of internationalism. In fact, Patterson was not simply writing about Africa from afar, but using poetry to imagine a form of belonging that his biography made both possible and unresolved.

The son of Russian artist Vera Aralova and African American designer, actor, and radio announcer Lloyd Patterson, he is still best known for his iconic childhood role as “little Jimmy” in Grigorii Aleksandrov’s musical comedy Circus (1936). But Patterson was also a naval officer, a graduate of the Gorky Literary Institute, and, most importantly, a poet.

Patterson died on May 22, 2025. Ahead of the first anniversary of his death, I want to return to his poetry, showing that its conventional Soviet themes do not make it merely formulaic. Instead, Patterson’s poems ask what poetry can still do: how it can connect people, answer violence, preserve tenderness, and refuse indifference.

Over the course of his Soviet career, Patterson published six poetry collections and two works of prose.

In the post-Soviet period, he published only one poetry chapbook, in 1993, shortly before emigrating to the United States with his mother. In America, he struggled to publish his Russian-language work. Only in 2022 did an English translation of his 1964 book, Chronicle of the Left Hand, appear. The book is Patterson’s family memoir, centered on his grandmother Margaret Glascoe’s account of post-Civil War Black life in America and extended through Patterson’s own reflections on his family’s movement between African American and Soviet histories.

But Patterson’s poetry remains much less known than his autobiographical work. Yet reading his poems reveals in him not only the child from Circus; not only a symbol of Soviet racial harmony; and not only the loyal Socialist Realist poet, but a writer who tried to create a poetic language capacious enough for his unusual heritage. Patterson wrote from inside Soviet internationalism, but his best poems also exceed it, asking what it means to belong to Russia, to Africa, to Black history, and to poetry—all at the same time.

In “Ballad of the Ryazan Sapper,” published in Vzaimodeistvie (Interaction, 1978), Patterson begins in what looks like a familiar Soviet internationalist mode: a Russian sapper leaves his mother in Ryazan for Guinea-Bissau, where the war has ended but landmines still slumber beneath the fields. At first, the poem is narrated from the outside, as a story of disciplined, selfless action. The sapper listens to the earth “like a doctor” palpating a fevered, anxious chest. The mine becomes a “bleeding” thing lodged in the soil, a wound that must be removed before tractors, girls with calabashes, and boys in pirogues can return to the landscape. 

But then the poem suddenly changes key. The third-person ballad opens into the first person: 

This movement from “he” to “I” to “we” gives the poem its force. Patterson does not simply describe Soviet solidarity with Africa, but enters the scene of repair himself and turns demining into a figure for the work his own poetry wants to perform. The ending makes this identification even more charged:

In another Soviet-era work, this merging of bloods and bodies might remain a noble internationalist metaphor. Patterson’s poem, by contrast, renders this metaphor literal. The joining of African and Russian blood is not just a figure of speech, but the intimate history of his own body, family, and poetic voice.

Patterson’s poetry is most often associated with public and politically urgent themes: American slavery and racism, African anti-colonial struggle, the Second World War, and Soviet labor and working life. Yet to read him only through race, biography, or Soviet internationalism would be to repeat the same reduction that followed him throughout his life: the tendency to see him as a symbol before seeing him as a writer. Browsing through his poetry collections, one also finds many poems about love, friendship, memory, nature, private grief, and happiness. Consider a short piece from the collection Zimnie lastochki (Winter Swallows, 1980), titled “To You.” Nothing in the poem requires the reader to know Patterson’s biography, which is precisely the point.

The poem is short, but its emotional scale is enormous. It imagines happiness as something impossible and physical at once: cosmic light made graspable, the night sky briefly close enough to touch.

Yet Patterson’s lyricism is not sealed off from the world for long. In “To Poets,” published in Krasnaia liliia (Red Lily, 1984), he turns to the tradition of love poetry. Addressing “poets, followers of Petrarch,” he positions love lyric in a damaged modern world, where changing times produce an “auction fever,” values are revalued, and love itself appears “not knowing love” and “deprived of the right to choose.” But the problem is not only moral disorientation, but the burden of history as such.

In a world that has seen slavery and fascism, love and poetry still matter, but can no longer remain innocent. Patterson does not tell poets to abandon beauty, love, or inherited literary forms. Instead, he asks them to attend to the histories that pass through those forms. Poetry’s political force, for Patterson, lies not in propaganda, but in refusal: the refusal to make peace with a world that makes love unfree.

Patterson never entirely separates lyric feeling from political life. For him, poetry was a place where feeling became answerable to the world. To love, to remember, to mourn, to praise, to refuse, to imagine oneself as another—all of these are poetic acts, but they are also ethical ones. On the first anniversary of his death, this is the Patterson I want to remember: not the child actor, but the mature poet whose lyric “I” kept reaching outward—to lovers and comrades, artists and workers, the dead and the living; to Russia, Africa, Black America, and the wounded earth.