Langston Hughes and the RNC: the 1920s

[mrissa]

I turned on my Twitter feed long enough to see that Donald Trump is the official nominee, as we have known he would be for weeks now. They have various people doing the sorts of things a convention does. So here’s your reminder from Langston Hughes that I, Too.

“I, Too” (also often called “I, Too, Sing America”) is both prophetic in an era when our

Comments

[tiger_spot]

(I find myself able to process poetry only a few poems at a time before they all start to blur together, plus I have been trapped under a newborn and my Collected Poems is really heavy and therefore not very compatible with being trapped under a newborn. Which is to say I am still in the 1920s and proceeding slowly.)

One thing that struck me about the poems in this decade -- and I haven't got past it yet so I'm not sure how much it changes later -- is the use of language. A lot of these have very heavy use of dialect spellings, in a way that strikes me as odd looking back from a modern perspective in which dialect spelling is generally regarded as othering. Then there are a few that have very Shakespearean language and images.

"Formula", I think, reflects Hughes grappling with the effects of the different choices available in both language and topics on how his works are being received and what he wants to do about it.

[mrissa]

I think it changes somewhat later. Particularly I think that Hughes goes more toward word choice rather than dialect spellings to indicate use of dialect. Madam Johnson (Alberta K), for example, is not phoneticized, and that I think allows her to reach kinds of audiences that she wouldn't as a character if she was "sho nuff"-ing and other dialect spellings--but also she is speaking in a very particular mode that Hughes captures perfectly.

But yes, "Formula" knows exactly what he's doing, and is having a good wrestle with it.

[alecaustin]

Late to this particular poetry party, but I've been enjoying the poems from the 1920s very much, to the point of photographing several of them for later review. "The South" and "Migration" are rough reading, as are the likes of "Drama for Winter Night (Fifth Avenue)", with its constant refrain of 'You can't stay/die here'.

Hughes' use of dialect spellings is interesting; ETA: there are definitely a lot more poems in the second half of the chapter using dialect. I assume he was coding specific information about the poem's narrator into its use, though obviously even then the effect is somewhat problematic (especially in the multiple female-narrated poems I just read.)

My conclusion, about halfway through the 1920s section of this book, is that I need to read more (good) poetry.