Experiencing History: black poets

Showing posts with label black poets. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

In honor of National Poetry Month... Langston Hughes poetry:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

by Langston Hughes

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and
older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Listen to Langston read it himself here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15722

The Poetry and Leadership of Langston Hughes:

Langston Hughes
1902 - 1967

First published in The Crisis in 1921, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", which became Hughes's signature poem, was collected in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues (1926). Hughes's life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas. Except for McKay, they worked together also to create the short-lived magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. As one of the founders of the Harlem Renaissance, which he practically defined in his essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926).

Langston was more than a poet, he was an activist as well. Hughes was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He stressed the theme of "black is beautiful" as he explored the black human condition in a variety of depths. His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience. His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind," Hughes is quoted as saying. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality. An expression of this is this poem:

"My People" picture book by Charles R. Smith

"My People"

by Langston Hughes

The night is beautiful,

So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,

So the eyes of my people

Beautiful, also, is the sun.

Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of black people who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States. The film was never made, but Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners. While there, he met African-American Robert Robinson, living in Moscow and unable to leave. In Turkmenistan, Hughes met and befriended the Hungarian polymath Arthur Koestler. Hughes also managed to travel to China and Japan before returning to the States.

Partly as a show of support for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937 Hughes traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers. Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the persistence of discriminatory U.S. Jim Crow laws existing while blacks were encouraged to fight against Fascism and the Axis powers. He came to support the war effort and black American involvement in it after deciding that blacks would also be contributing to their struggle for civil rights at home. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept." In 1953, he was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Stakes a Claim,Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple's Uncle Sam. He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography (The Big Sea) and co-wrote the play Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston.

In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, New York City, has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed "Langston Hughes Place."

Read more about Langston Hughes and his work here:
http://episoderapture.blogspot.com/2012/04/negro-artist-and-racial-mountain.html

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/83

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes
http://www.biography.com/people/langston-hughes-9346313

Monday, October 24, 2011

Langston Hughes' "Mulatto" Hits Broadway!

On October 24 in Black History...

In 1935, "Mulatto", the first Black-authored (Langston Hughes) play to become a long-run Broadway hit, opens.

Written during the summer of 1930, Mulatto is Langston Hughes's first full-length play. It appears to have come to him quickly; its painful and melodramatic depictions of father-son conflict, the power of class and whiteness, the legacy of slavery, and the vicious oppression of African Americans in the South were all preoccupations taken up in his earlier work. Many commentators have noted Hughes's personal investment in his narratives of father-son conflict, and the metaphorical relation of miscegenated family and nation.

The play also seeks to correct the dramatic representation of lynching in such plays as the 1927 Pulitzer Prize-winning In Abraham's Bosom, by Paul Green, in which lynching is the inevitable and unchallenged-although not thereby justified-fate of Abe McCranie, the impetuous and irascible central character. The plots of the two works are similar in many ways, but in Hughes's play the black characters are articulate, rational, and courageous. Not usually understood as an antilynching play, Mulatto is set in Georgia and was written in a year when that state led the nation in lynchings. Cora's accusations that the Colonel is in themob seeking the son who murdered him speak eloquently to the horrifying internecine dimensions of Southern brutality. (In 1961, Hughes wrote regarding some revisions his editor, Webster Smalley, had proposed: "Mulatto might be left timeless, since they still behave like that in the backwoods of Georgia. In the big towns, of course, individual sitins like Bert's have grown to mass-sit-ins. Otherwise, no difference.")

Opening on October 24, 1935, at the Vanderbilt Theatre, Mulatto ran on Broadway for more than a year and toured for two seasons. The Broadway Mulatto was, however, greatly altered by the producer, Martin Jones, who sensationalized an already shocking story. Among other changes, in his version Sallie misses the train and is raped by Talbot in the final scene. No text for the Broadway Mulatto has surfaced.

The version of Mulatto printed here is dated by Hughes's covering remarks as 1942, although the copyright is given as 1932. The cover sheet reads: "from the short story 'Father and Son' in The Ways of White Folks. Original first version of 'Mulatto,' written at Hedgerow Theatre, Maryland Rose Valley, in which no girl is raped. That was added by Mr. Martin Jones for the Broadway production. Langston Hughes, Dec. 28, 1942." On the title page he adds, "This play might also be called 'The Colonel's Son.'" The comment about the short story is puzzling because "Father and Son" was most certainly written later than the play; however, Hughes did, at one point, recommend the short story to Martin Jones, to give him a better sense of the play. The manuscript is actually a photocopy of a typescript on which Hughes pasted minor revisions. The photocopy on which the changes are made is dated 1945 by the Beinecke Library. Internal evidence places the original as having been written between 1934 and 1938. This version differs from the version published in Five Plays by Langston Hughes in several ways, most notably in the last lines of the final scene. It is this version, probably minus the changes on this photocopy, that was the basis for several of the play's translations.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Plays-to-1942/Langston-Hughes/e/9780826213693

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Gil Scott-Heron, A Voice of Black Culture

Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, passed away yesterday, May 27, 2011 at the age of 62 in Manhattan, NY.

Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago, Illinois, but spent his early childhood in Jackson, Tennessee, the home of his maternal grandmother Lillie Scott.^{[citation needed]} Gil's mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, sang with the New York Oratorio Society. Scott-Heron's Jamaican father,Gilbert "Gil" Heron, nicknamed "The Black Arrow", was a football player who, in the 1950s, became the first black athlete to play for Glasgow's Celtic Football Club. Gil's parents divorced when he was young and Gil was sent to live with his grandmother Lillie Scott.^[4] When Scott-Heron was 13 years old, his grandmother died and he moved with his mother to The Bronx in New York City, where he enrolled in DeWitt Clinton High School. He later transferred to The Fieldston School after one of his teachers, a Fieldston graduate, showed one of his writings to the head of the English department at Fieldston and he was granted a full scholarship.

Scott-Heron attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, as it was the college chosen by his biggest influence Langston Hughes. It was here that Scott-Heron met Brian Jackson with whom he formed the band Black & Blues. After about two years at Lincoln, Scott-Heron took a year off to write the novels The Vulture and The Nigger Factory.^[5] He returned to New York City, settling in Chelsea, Manhattan. The Vulture was published in 1970 and well received. Although Scott-Heron never received his undergraduate degree, he had a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Read the full article here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron

Scott-Heron began his recording career in 1970 with the LP Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Bob Thiele of Flying Dutchman Records produced the album, and Scott-Heron was accompanied by Eddie Knowles and Charlie Saunders on conga and David Barnes on percussion and vocals. The album's 15 tracks dealt with themes such as the superficiality of television and mass consumerism, the hypocrisy of some would-be Black revolutionaries, and white middle-class ignorance of the difficulties faced by inner-city residents. In the liner notes, Scott-Heron acknowledged as influencesRichie Havens, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jose Feliciano, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Nina Simone, and the pianist who would become his long-time collaborator, Brian Jackson. The album also included a live recitation of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” accompanied by conga and bongo drums. A second version of that piece, recorded with a full band including the jazz bassist Ron Carter, was released on Mr. Scott-Heron’s second album, “Pieces of a Man,” in 1971.

Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics.

Yet, along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude and stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions and has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being sampled by stars like Kanye West. Read full article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/arts/music/gil-scott-heron-voice-of-black-culture-dies-at-62.html

http://episoderapture.blogspot.com/2011/05/revolution-will-not-be-televised-gil.html

Monday, November 29, 2010