langston hughes is a badass

Hi friends. Meg here.

I have to admit that hearing Langston Hughes read his own work made the poems (proclamations, confessions, questions) really come alive for me. They popped, out of nowhere. Just hearing that one poem (The Weary Blues) in his cadence with his steady voice shifted my reading of every other piece in the packet. It had everything to do with his timing, his tone. I went back & read them again, finding that I had new things to say about them & new respect for them. I was excited, suddenly. Curious. I’m wondering, sheepishly, if this is proof that I am a sad product of white, privileged akademia or if I simply favor poetry off the page. Probably both?

Either way, I really believe that this is work that belongs in both spaces; in some cases, reading it aloud might downplay some of his wordplay at the same time that limiting it to the page really limits its power. I’m thinking a lot about power as I read these poems – his, theirs, mine, & also that of the reader, the speaker, the poet.

I have questions & comments about each poem, but I’m not sure how to lay them out here. I’ll focus on my favorite piece & maybe see what other folks post & comment there later on.

While Let America Be America is my favorite poem (omg Hughes is such a badass!), Cultural Exchange has got me hooked. I spent a lot of time with this poem trying to dust off the surface layer of his allusions & repetition, moving back and forth between the dictionary & the encyclopedia.

I like the way the word “exchange” is used in this poem’s title. I project myself here, having read through it, and imagine foreign exchange students, their embarkment voluntary & eye-opening, not to mention exciting. While I realize that this kind of exchange is not necessarily what Hughes is enacting by the end of the poem – and the political pro-segregationists he calls out are far spit from innocent foreign exchange students --  I like to think that we, as contemporary readers, can still have that eye-opening reminder. We can participate in the contrast of that last stanza, hop onto that two-way cultural street & try to imagine who, in contemporary government (or any kind of power, really), we might substitute for Faubus, Eastland & Wallace. I’m wondering what our “cultural exchange” of today might look like.

I want to hop back to the beginning of this poem. In the first stanza, Hughes introduces Leontyne in the last line. Leontyne Price (if this is, in fact, to whom he’s referring) was an African American soprano who came up in the 1950s & 60s. She was America’s first African American prima donna in the Metropolitan Opera, a huge step for the arts world at the time. I love that line, “Yet Leontyne’s unpacking.” Hughes is so confident here, a perfect cross between defiant & cocky, that the adrenaline of the poem skyrockets. He owns you here, you can’t help but keep reading. He knows what’s going to happen, he knows that despite everything that’s going on to prevent desegregation & the momentum of civil rights, that Leontyne is here to stay.

I’m curious, though, in the next stanza, about the German reference “lieder.” The internets informed me that lieder is German for song, specifically a romantic art song, or pastoral tune pulled directly from a poem. Does anyone have a read on this? The wordplay & alliteration works wonders later on (“Lovely Lieder, Leontyne”), but I don’t know what the German references are for or why lieder is always capitalized.

I think I’ve probably written too much, so I’ll pull it up short here. The slant rhymes in the seventh stanza are so badass when fitted against the architecture of the poem. That stanza, in general, owns it. My favorite line is “Sometimes even buried with our family.” It’s dripping with so much past & present & future all at once, his confidence hitting the line out of the park.

Oh! One last thing: From what I’ve read (on the vast & often misleading internets), all of the misspellings are purposeful (such as in the first stanza). Hughes was a sharp mind & impeccable speller, and most folks (on said internets) say that the intentional misspelling was a prod toward what was expected of a “common black man,” as a means of inclusivity. I do feel that he had a personal agenda in writing it this way, but I doubt it was as simple as appealing to more readers or replicating an authentic voice. Ideas?