Before
I get into my responses to the reading, I want to briefly say that, for the
second week in a row, I left the Edwards reading for last and, after reading
it, had to go back and revise my initial readings of the other texts,
particularly Johnson's preface. The first time I read it, I very much sensed a
privileging of the literary and even, perhaps, the white. In addition to the
assigned readings, at Imani's suggestion, I also read Hughes's “The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which Hughes describes a troubling tendency
among his peers, writing, “[A] young Negro poet said to me once, 'I want to be
a poet—not a Negro poet,' meaning, I believe,
'I want to write like a white poet' […] this is the mountain standing in the
way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward
whiteness.”
When
Johnson says things like “A people may become great through many means, but
there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged
[…] the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced,” and
repeatedly disparages the accomplishments of the poets he's including in his
collection, I certainly see him privileging the literary and the white/Western,
even as he exalts the musical quality of dialect writing. Edwards's generous
and careful reading, though, picked up on some thing which I certainly did not,
and which have great bearing on Hughes's poetry.
I
unfortunately don't have the space in this blog entry to rehash Edwards's
argument in detail. I will, however, draw out the threads I found most
compelling, such as his discussions of performance and swing(ing)/sway. Edwards
draws this concept from Johnson's preface to Book of American Negro
Spirituals, in which Johnson describes the swaying bodies of the
congregation keeping time, but the particulars of this time are important. He
is trying to transcribe these sermons with some difficulty, writing, “The
'swing' of the spirituals is an altogether subtle and elusive thing. It is
subtle and elusive because it is in perfect union with the religious ecstasy
that manifests itself in the swaying bodies of the whole congregation.” As Edwards explains, though, “[A] true
transcription is possible for Johnson; it is one in which the transcriptional
form somehow 'catches' what it cannot represent notationally” (589).
Hughes's
poems attempt to catch something of the blues in a similar way. Edwards
talks about a double-apostrophe in the blues poetry of Hughes. Hughes isn't
transcribing an original performance like Johnson; instead he's writing a text
in which “sight is forced to infer an absent sound,” in which there is no
original performance to transcribe, per se. Absence, Edwards points out,
is an essential feature of the blues, in which an apostrophe calling out to an
absent lover is also a prominent formal feature. So to put this in my own
words, the absence of the performance actually performs absence. Since we
recognize a musical quality that isn't there but feels like it should be,
that the poem is invoking through its formal elements, we are doubly-aware of
the sense of loss that the poem conveys.
That
said, I've found a couple of readings of Hughes's poems that I thought we
should consider. In a way, I felt like Edwards was saying that the ideal
performance of Hughes's poems was in the text itself, because it contained that
double-apostrophe, that mixtery between the event—the performance—and the fixed
text. However, I'd like to talk together in class about how this performance of
“Weary Blues”--which doesn't come from Fine Clothes to the Jew, but
which I chose because there's a video of Hughes performing it that I found
super compelling, particularly because he reads the words “This is what I'm
gonna sing,” in spite of the music. I also included a performance of “Mulatto,”
which comes from “From the Georgia Roads” in Fine Clothes because I
thought it embodied call-and-response in a way in which perhaps Edwards was
suggesting the “Blues” poems in Fine Clothes didn't.
Hughes
reads “Weary Blues” to Jazz accompaniment:
“Mulatto,”
with not musical accompaniment:
Listening,
rather than reading of “Mulatto,” do we experience the kind of apostrophe
Edwards is talking about? Do we feel the absence of music? And if not—for me
the answer is no—is it because the apostrophe is absent in the text, or is it a
failure as a reader? Is there anything significantly different between this
reading and the way Hughes reads “Weary Blues” above? Or is there a difference
in the way this poem invokes call and response in its text that links it with
that aural tradition rather than a musical blues tradition?
I
should mention this was one of the more troubling poems for me to read, more
troubling still to hear. In the preface to Fine Clothes, Hughes wrote
“The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are
sung, people laugh,” and while this poem did not come from the “blues”
collection of the poems, I didn't find myself laughing when I read it or when I
heard this reading of it. In fact, I didn't experience the laughter much at all
in this collection. I'm curious to hear if I'm alone in this, or if I should
take Hughes's statement literally or not.
Thanks Hannah--key questions to be sure! Looking forward to reading your classmates' responses.
ReplyDeleteHannah-- I'm interested in the idea that you've set forward, above, that "the absence of the performance actually performs absence.” I definitely felt, especially at first, a sense of lack when reading through Fine Clothes to the Jew—the poems felt like songs “deprived” of music. That being said, I wouldn’t say it felt like loss, and I find it harder to think of it that way. Loss implies having something first. But as I’ve never heard any of these particular texts set to music, I didn’t register the loss of anything. Just a kind of emptiness. Along those lines, I find it difficult to think of these poems, or poems like them, as “transcriptions” of music. I think they essentially become something else on the page—we encounter them different as readers than as listeners. So what is this “something else?”
ReplyDeleteThe self-consciousness of the poems, characterized by the recognizable repetitions of verses in a song, really gives me pause. To me, repetition works a bit differently in music than in language. In music, repetitions of phrases, and even texts, build meaning in a particular way, and they can give the listener a sense of stability and the satisfaction that comes with predictability. In text, though, it seems to me that one really has to “earn” a repetition, as least in a lot of contemporary genres. So to write these verses in Fine Clothes that really seem to “ask” to be set to music is a puzzle for me.
Perhaps even more jarring to me than reading his poems to myself (music-less) in Fine Clothes was Langston Hughes’ reading of “Weary Blues” to the accompaniment of the jazz band. With musicians at hand to “perform” the texts, why just “say” the words overtop their playing? To me this feels like the more contrived combination of words and music, but one that raises some of the same questions that I’m raising above: Why the choice to publish a volume of poems rather than work with a composer to put out a volume of songs, with music set to these texts? More to the point: what does written poetry afford that sung lyric doesn’t?
I think this question is also at the heart of my response to James Weldon Johnson. Sometimes text relies on its relationship to music to lend it strength, but in his preface music often gets subordinated to literature, or text, anyway. Ultimately I think it’s difficult to ever really fully separate word and music, or text and music, which find a kind of meeting point in the term “lyric.” Knowing that these registers will always fade into one another to some extent is a useful realization for me, but nevertheless throws into even sharper relief the question about why artists choose one over the other.
Hannah: I also think that the idea, or the image, of “the absence of the performance actually performs absence” can be a good topic for discussion. I believe, as it always happen with poetry, that all the elements of the text must be taken into consideration. For instance, Hughes’ introductory note, “A NOTE ON BLUES,” is essential in the further reading experience of Fine Clothes to the Jew. I wonder if the lack of laughter experienced while reading these poems in silence, alone, is precisely the result of not following Hughes’ directions. In his introductory note, he suggests that “The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.” How many of us sang, instead of simply reading in silence, these poems?
ReplyDeleteBlues, I think, implies a certain range of feelings and emotions, an iterative correspondence between stillness and the hope to move beyond. Reading through Fine Clothes… intertextuality, both textual and sonic, was inevitable convoked. “Po’ Boy Blues” drove me towards Kamau Brathwaite, specifically Black + Blues (1976), a poetry collection that I have read a few times while listening to Sun Ra. In my reading of Brathwaite, the blues has been already broken or, if not broken, the blues emerges, unlike Hughes’ Fine Clothes…, from altered and progressive iteration. For instance, Brathwaite sings: “wid dese blues / wid dese bogle blues / wid dese broken bokkle blues…” Here we can see how each verse, as the poem moves forwards, keeps adding tension. However, this is only noticeable when we sing the poems, ‘cause silent reading tends to neutralize the chromatic aspects of voice and wording. Extra-textual performance, as both Hannah and Laura pointed out, infuses the poem a collective dimension. Hughes, as his introductory note implies, anticipates laughter only under the condition of singing his poems not in solitude. “When they are sung people laugh,” laughter itself is a relational gesture, a response to an either binary or collective encounter.
Following this spirit, and focusing on the reading of “Mulatto,” my intertextual anxiety sent me to Nicolás Guillén, the Afrocuban poet who also sang his verses. Coincidentally, both Hughes and Guillén were born on 1902, right with the century. Guillén was also very sensitive to the sonic aspects of poetry. His poem “Mulata” (Mulatto woman) and furthermore “Canto negro” (Black song) are good examples of the orality and the rhythmic immanence between the sang word and poetry. Perhaps, and I pose this as a discussion note, both music and the “written word” have their own linguistic rhythms, with a syntax that often times overlaps with each other, as music can touch the written word and vice versa.
“Canto negro” by Nicolás Guillén: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE9Z-zCxyZg
Hannah—thank you for the videos. Definitely something to meditate on.
ReplyDeleteI’m particularly taken with your elucidation of absence in Hughes’s poems, wherein “the absence of the performance actually performs absence. Since we recognize a musical quality that isn't there but feels like it should be, that the poem is invoking through its formal elements, we are doubly-aware of the sense of loss that the poem conveys.” That this theorization doesn’t entirely hold once the poems are read aloud is also interesting. Not surprisingly considering your personal and professional interests, you frame this chasm as a pedagogical problem: is it the text that’s failing to perform or is it you? In setting up the question, you make a division between “listening” and “reading,” and while I understand the sense-/rhetoric-based reasons for this, I wonder if your very question doesn’t require a collapse of terms and their potential. Edwards himself does this—as you note—when he writes of “sight [being] forced to infer an absent sound.” Yet I wonder if this force is unidirectional. That is, if, in “seeing” absent sound, one is not also genuinely “hearing” that absence, whereas the (failed) absences within the performances are “read for” and produce a kind of anxiety that feels to me wrapped in language even as it orients itself as otherwise.
I say this not because I’m invested in semantics (though perhaps I am) but because I think a mixing of vocabulary returns a sense of strangeness and labor to conventional questions about the relationship between poetry on the page and poetry read aloud. Here, I’m reminded of a reading Terrance Hayes gave over the summer. During the Q&A portion, someone in the audience presented him with the following hypothetical: if he had choose between poetry only existing in its auditory form or its written form from now until the end of time, which would he choose? After reflecting on the value of both approaches, Hayes (who, it is worth saying, is a great reader of his own work) ultimately chose to preserve the written page. Part of his reasoning was that poems that are read exists only between the reader and their audience whereas poems on the page can (at least theoretically) be read by anyone at any time in any place. This brings me back to your post in a few ways, but the most pressing is whether or not you think it might be possible that another reading—one not done by Hughes—might be able to “catch” the absence of the poems as written or if there’s something about them being read aloud that triggers a consistent, if potentially disappointing, experience.
In part because I’m currently in a course about the lyric poem, I found myself unable to stop my mind from returning endlessly to Edwards’ discussion of the lyric and black disruptions of/inscriptions with it. The possibility for subjectivity within the lyric genre and form reminded me of our discussions about Louis Armstrong’s live “Black and Blue” performance, as well as the experimental defiance of black musical artists in the mid-20th century. I was also reminded of the earlier citation of Toni Morrison, who privileged black vernacular as essential to the artistic success of black-authored texts. One immediate question that arises for me in a time when the lyric poem still reigns (if not necessarily in every kingdom) is what role vernacular might still play in allowing for the possibilities of black lyric subjectivities and how we might avoid the problems of black “authenticity” that have plagued us since our first discussion.