Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Week 4: Open Thread for Post-Class Comments
At your request, here is an "open" thread for post-class commentary on Langston Hughes' Fine Clothes, Johnson's Preface, and Brent Edward's essay "The Eclipsed Window of Form." Feel free to return to the topics we raised tonight and/or to take up questions that we didn't discuss.
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I'm finding it hard to say something I haven't already said either in my blog post or in class, but I suppose what I was most interested in from this week's discussion was the multivocality of Hughes poems. We saw that in "Mulatto," it opened up a number of possibilities for reading the poem, depending on which lines you attribute to which voice and which lines receive priority. In fact, I think we concluded--or at least considered--that the multivocality of "Mulatto" allowed for ways of reading the poem that celebrated the black female body and the body of her mixed-race child through imagery of the pine forest, the stars, etc. Similarly, also from the "Georgia Roads" section, though at the other end of the emotional spectrum, "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" seems to come to us from a number of different speakers, given the linguistic diversity it includes, but to a different effect. This poem celebrates the multilingual(trans-lingual?) quality of music. Imani directed us to the lines "Play it, jazz band!/ You've got seven languages to speak in/ And then some,/ Even if you do come from Georgia."
ReplyDeleteThis celebration of the power of music to communicate across languages/without language brings me back to my original question about Hughes's poems that I don't know if we came to a satisfying answer to. Why, if he believes so strongly in the power of music, does he write poetry? If we answer "because he's a poet," I have to ask, "Well, why is he a poet, then?" I think this question in class came across as if I were calling attention to the inadequacy of his writing in comparison to music, but that's not quite what I meant. In fact, I think what Gabrielle said when she said "Poetry can do things--and I think this is what I mean by that" in reference to the multivocality of "Mulatto," she hit on a partial answer to my question. By "Why is he a poet?" or "Why is this a poem [and not a song]?" what I really mean is "What is it that words on a page can do that music can't/doesn't, for Hughes?" His performances of his poems seem to offer clues, but I'm still not sure what the precise answer is. "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" seems to claim that music can accomplish as much as/more than even the most multivocal poem, so I feel like there has to be more to it than this.
I suspect our continued discussions of poetics will pursue this question as the class goes on: What is it that Poetry does better than music and/or prose? What does it capture that is unique to poetry--if anything? And I'm glad we've got some poets in the class to bring their perspectives!
Thanks for the lively discussion and the courteous attention to my presentation Tuesday.
Hi Hannah--to reframe your question slightly; the question might not be "what does poetry do better," but to ask--what does it mean to attend to the "problem of divergent forms," as Edwards would say. Our subsequent readings will further complicate this problem. For instance. Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hughes presents poems that are *composed* for musical accompaniment. As explored in the readings for this week, However, the experience of reading them opens new ways of looking at the poem as a visual object. What reading practices do we employ to understand his side-by-side placement of the text of the poem and his notes in the margins? Are the notes just notes, or do they become part of the poem? How does the form of the poetry collection serve to highlight an investment in a poetics transmitted through written language, in ways that might gesture toward, but not precisely duplicate music? Finally, (and we will take this up in class) how is a reading audience different from a listening audience?
DeleteAfter class I’m thinking a lot about Hughes’ reading and authenticity in the video we watched. I wonder how much of the resistance to take Hughes’ reading as serious or not fixed for a certain, white audience was due to his legibility as a light skinned, (probably queer) man with a lisp, and him not fitting whatever our expectations of what a masculine blues poetic persona should be. I could be off-base but I think it is something to consider.
ReplyDeleteI keep going back to how Ellison described the blues, as Edwards quotes, “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically”(582). I keep thinking about this and how my writing already does or can fit this description in the future. Keeping with Hughes, I think that Edwards’ words on written on poetics when comparing how we read a Hughes poem, versus how he performs it: “So poetry is less musical in the traditional sense of lyric because poetic mimesis relies less on the tonal properties of performed language and more on the potential of written form to imply ‘stress’ and ‘rhythm’”(582). This makes me think about whether or not poetry written to be read on the page, rather than be performed, can lose itself, or ever be fully functional or effective when read aloud.
You're not off base at all. The last question you pose--about poetry "written to be read on the page, rather than performed," is a question for the ages. To add another question, if something is indeed lost in the transfer from the page to performance (or vice versa) can there be something generative in that loss? More on this later.
DeleteLike Steffan I keep going back to our discussion of Hughes’s performance and these notions of authenticity that were brought up in class. Coming at this from a poetry background, I want to address these notions with that in mind. The first thing I want to think about is Hughes’s dry performance being because we didn’t have things like Def Poetry Jam and Button Poetry. While I agree that we wouldn’t have something akin to Willie Perdomo’s “Nigger Rican Blues,” but using that notion to say Hughes’s dry reading style is just a product of the time I think ignores the orality of poetry throughout history. While the move from poetry as a performed/sung art to a primarily written art has influenced how poetry is read aloud, the fact that sound devices such as rhyme, alliteration, assonance, etc. have continually functioned as poetic markers points to at least some lingering notion of the oral quality to poetry. Further, Hughes, in invoking Blues, has to at least have these notions in his mind. With that in mind it seems like Hughes is making a very conscious choice to perform in this dry manner. But why?
ReplyDeleteThe next thing I wanted to address was this unease with Hughes’s reading of “Hey!” and the reading of Standard English where dialect is written. Admittedly I was a bit uncomfortable with this, as well, but not because I thought Hughes was pandering to a white audience, a notion that was brought up in class. My unease came from the fact that Hughes isn’t reading the poem as it appears on the page. Now, this isn’t something I normally have a problem with. Poems are very rarely read precisely as they appear on the page, words sometimes mistakenly (or purposefully) replaced with another, pronunciations slipped into the vernacular (something like “want to” on the page being read as “wanna”) and I’m often critiqued myself in workshops for not reading the poem like classmates expect it to be read. Further, as Gabrielle mentioned in class, we could read this as Hughes participating in a tradition of improvisation, reading the same content on the page in a different linguistic register. However, there’s a difference between slipping into dialect and purposefully not reading it where it appears in the text. What bothers me is that Hughes made a conscious decision to write in dialect. That choice shows that he thinks it’s important to the contents of the poems, and so to not read it in a performance questions if it is truly necessary. The whole thing brings to the forefront questions of how much fidelity to the page a poet owes the poem in any given reading/performance of it.
This is great. Be sure to raise these issues in class, many of these questions are taken up in the Muse is Music. And yes, the decision to not include dialect is a telling one. I don't think Hughes' dry reading style is a product of the time, necessarily (although I think spoken word traditions have shaped audience expectations for poetry readings by poets of color in certain ways; more on this later.) But I do think it's a product of Hughes himself, as Jones writes, "the nasal Midwestern drawl evident in his enunciation" perhaps defies our expectations for a poet who writes in dialect. I like your question of "fidelity to the page" however. The choices one makes to slip in (or out) of dialect as the case may be, are meaningful and worthy of discussion.
DeleteApparently thinking about Hughes is the thing of the week. So I also still have concerns about Hughes' authenticity not based in an ideology of policing blackness, but instead based on the way Hughes sets out to explain a black experience that he may not be fully apart of. It brings to the question of whether or not it is alright to speak for marginalized group. There is something to be said about his experience being lighter skinned and college educated and how that in fact influences his writings and readings. I think of it in the contemporary way of what rappers can actually perform trap music and fully be authentic, someone like Childish Gambino would be incapable of being authentic when it comes to trap music, but would be able to be a ghost writer. There's a lot of questions that come up when it comes to Hughes that make me want to look more closely into him as someone who studies black elite identity. We didn't bring up James Weldon Johnson being the writer of Lift Evr'y Voice and Sing, the Black National Anthem. I also wanted to make a point that Johnson, based on that song, created the voice for Black Americans. Something that continues to be a song that speaks to black trauma. I couldn't find Mizzou students singing the song after the boycott, but here's an article in which a student mentions the importance of the song. Something to think about when considering, who is writing our history and how does the performance of music write our history: http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/11/us/university-of-missouri-racism-protests-history/
ReplyDelete-Candice C. Robinson
This is a vexed question in black studies: the idea of the artist's distance from the group she or he claims to represent. This may be a question about the artist's class background; but we might also consider that an artist, no matter what their origin, will often face this question of distance by the time they have platform. How did Hughes seek to negotiate this distance, and to what end? Indeed, in the Muse is Music, Jones argues that Hughes strategically underplayed his education and erudition in order to craft his persona as a poet of the people. There is much to to be said about the problematics (and possibilities, I might add) of this move. I hope we discuss this tomorrow.
DeleteGreat questions, which I'd urge you to reiterate in class. What does it mean for form to speak? (to me, it suggests the importance of the voice, of language, of (poly)vocality, which can certainly "do" something, but in a very specific way). Looking forward to hearing what the class thinks.
ReplyDeleteThe mood of Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung, people laugh."
ReplyDeleteSo I've been thinking about Hughes' intro and the question brought up in class inquiring about why the audience would laugh. In his preface, Johnson connotes the Negro dialect with humor and pathos. He claims that young poets, try to break away from this dialect--as Edwards later observes--because they do not want to be defined within the stereotypes of black Americans being considered a "happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking being or more or less a pathetic figure." (15)
I think that Blues forces the audience to laugh because of its bittersweet irony. I’ve noticed throughout this week’s thread reference to voice, and performance with regards to Hughes’ Blues poems. Perhaps Hughes’ choice to perform his poems with monotonous and as I believe as Imani pointed out "the nasal Midwestern drawl” was the best way to communicate the solemnity of the “black experience” where Hughes defines that Blues songs, “are today songs, here and now, broke and broken-hearted, when you’re troubled in mind and don’t know what to do, and nobody cares.” (143-144)
With a creative writing background I’d like to think that the dialect Hughes writes on the page is merely character, separate from the creator. Hughes uses punctuation and phonetics to deliver the message his voice cannot in performance. A week ago, I saw an animated video of an interpretation of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” As I watched, I thought about the ways in which the illustrations informed my understanding of the poem. I also wondered if the narrator’s voice and the musical accompaniment furthered this connection. Had I enjoyed the poem for its visual and sonic stimulation, or rather, its content and subject matter alone? So, this leads me to my last and final thought: what gets lost in visual performance? How does sonic and visual enhance the audience’s understanding of the experience?
Here’s a link to the video: https://vimeo.com/87760751
I’d like to hear your thoughts about this piece!