Hughes

All right, bear with me. I hate blogging, and not even Elmaz’s evil eye changed that the last time I had class with her. Last week, I was moving from across the bay, but this week that didn’t happen, so I’m out of those; moving on to Mr. Hughes.
Some questions I came up with at the end of my response that are better posted earlier:
To whom do we cater our work? Why? Should we not? Are there times we have to? Did Langston Hughes consciously work with/around that?

Last week, when I read Shel’s response about Hughes work being, essentially, simple, I wanted to balk, but I thought, Well, how much have I read his work and how much in depth? I considered the review, but upon reading the commentary I saw that Shel changed her opinion after seeing the video. So I watched the video next. Here I go.

The simple language of Hughes’ work by no means makes his poetry simplistic. It allows a smoother conveyance of very complex, and not necessarily universal, experiences and history through language in a way that is slower and more absorbable for any reader’s pace and acceptance. It’s like a dish at a five-star, if you will – it’s not so much how crazy you can get with it, but that the ingredients are fresh, put together innovatively, stirs response, and is savored.

In the video, the music is so fast, upbeat, and rhythmic. It’s not how I ever hear poetry when I read it, whether silently or aloud, but that’s what made the juxtaposition of the reading in the video so telling. The gentle flow of Hughes’ words tricks you into being unguarded for the anything but gentle impact of their (the words) individual and grouped meanings. The contrast of the running music splashes a lot of color onto the walking of the words. It enhances the content. The language of his work should reflect more of his culture than that of the elite, which was what I was going to argue in a comment except that the video did the work for me. However, since we discussed that in class, I won’t linger on that.

The matter of complexity of Hughes’ language in his work really got me thinking about the problems I have encountered personally in trying to write poetry that expresses my experiences across and between more than culture. Hughes had major things to write about (who’s to measure, I know), but he also had to incorporate these heavy civil, historical, and political issues into his art form. I tend to think of poetry, and even other forms of art, as two-sided work at least: there is everything that inspired and molded it, and there is the art form in and of itself. Hughes puts words together in a fashion that may seem less sophisticated, maybe, but it matters what is behind those words and what those words paint that comes forward after.

I have been really confused as a poet, and I have known that what I want to write about can be too huge for me to put onto paper in a digestible way (never mind savory!). There have been lines between my experiences and my work/art because of a thing as default as my audience. I have felt exasperated that my readers don’t get a thing I’m writing about, but I have looked around the table and I don’t see how they could – I was born and raised in San Francisco, and the first in my family to be stamped Made in the U.S.A. , and no, I don’t know what winters are like in Ohio. It happens. I have changed what I write poetry about, even how I make the poetry, and I thought I was just developing as a poet by learning new techniques, adding more tools to the box. Wrong. I was choosing a new kind of poetry that let other poets I studied with to understand my work through me and my efforts, and completely neglecting to write poetry that might make some of them try to understand me through my work.

Well, pfffffft…eff that. I’m in a multicultural, technicolor world again. Thanks for bringing me back.

Jennifer