hughes
Langston Hughes: A Poet Supreme Black poetry is poetry that (1) is grounded in the black experience; (2) utilizes black music as a structural or emulative model; and (3) "consciously" transforms the prevailing standards of poetry through and inconoclastic and innovative use of language. No poet better carries the mantle of model and innovator the Langston Hughes, the prolific Duke Ellington of black poetry. Hughes's output alone is staggering. During his lifetime, he published over eight hundred poems. Moreover, he single-handedly defined "blues poetry" and is arguably the first major "jazz" poet. Early in his career he realized the importance of "reading" his poetry to receptive audiences. "When Alain Locke arranged a poetry reading by Hughes before the Playwriter's Circle in 1972 in Washington, a blues pianist accompanied him, bringing Hughes the artist and blues music one step closer together, even though Hughes felt that the piano player was 'too polished.' He suggested to! his Knopf editor that they ought to get 'a regular Lenox Avenue blues boy' to accompany him at his reading in New York." In the fifties Hughes was a major voice in the movement of recording with jazz accompaniment. Although I have neither the space, incli
However, because Hughes was a literary artist, because he was tied to the written as well as the oral tradition, and because he made sometimes drastic revisions of his blues poems, such an examination helps to reaveal his attitudes toward his material as they modulate over the years and to illuminate the nature of his use of the oral blues tradition in his written work. The importance of this observation is that this is another piece of irrefutable evidence that Hughes's writing style was not reflective of the limitations of an "undisciplined", unsophisticated, and provincial poet. Montage gave us defining metaphors of the black experience--"the dream deferred" and "raisins in the sun. Langston Hughes and the Blues, Steven Tracy's detailed reading and explication of Hughes's blues poetry, more than adequately defines Hughes's consummate poetic artistry. Moreover, the birth of the African American was as a chattel slave, as a co!mmercial product. " Langston Hughes, a poet who had cut his teeth and made his mark as a blues` poet, took up the challenge of writing book-length bebop jazz peom! Although, just like the music, there is a bedrock of blues undergirding the jazz structure, Hughes objective and success was in creating a modern jazz structure that allowed for a broader range of themes, voices, and even styles. " There is an African proverb used to express futility: "like singing to a white man. In the headnote to Montage, Hughes declares, "In the terms of current Afro-American popular music and sources from which it has progressed--jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop--this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be!-bop, is marked by conflicting changes sudden naunces, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rythems, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes like the popular song, puncuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and distortions of the music of a community in transition. Hughes clearly close to emphasize black music, which increasingly meant dealing with improvisation. Finally, another aspect of Hughes's abilites that is also overlooked or ignored is that he was multilingual and masterfully translated poetry, including seminal work of Nicholas Gullien and Federico Garcia Lorca. But God, Nature, or somebody made them that way. This is not new, or novel, but it does continue to be controversial precisely because it contextualizes art within the world as the world actually is , beset by dominant and dominating forces who enforce (sometimes under the rubric of "free enterprise") all manners of economic exploitation. Too many people in their literary criticism completely overlook social context and hence overlook as well the fact that the social thrust of peotry is intergral to its aestetics. In a very important sence, modern American poetry was moving toward painting, that is, a composition of words placed on a page, and away from music, t!hat is, an articulation of words that have been both sense (meaning) and sound (emotion).
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Acceptance Essays
