Black

I Was Blind with Hunger for Your Love (Summer Morn in New Hampshire)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

A lot of the poetry I combine with music here was published around 100 years ago, making it clearly in the public domain for reuse. Given my age, some of the poetry from the Previous Twenties doesn’t seem all that old — after all, many of the poets’ lives overlapped mine — but some poets and poems look back, as I do now from my 2020s, to older styles of poetic expression, ones from an additional 100 years before the 1920s poet. That may be too much for some younger audiences I think.

Since poetry is at least partly about how  something is said, it’s not out of line for style to be substantial when we choose to read or listen to poetry — but, sometimes we might choose to “translate” poetry for performance to make it more immediate.

Here’s an example. I came upon this 1922 poem by Claude McKay while looking for summer poems. I’ve presented McKay a few times already here.  A figure stored away in the Tupperware container labeled The Harlem Renaissance, McKay’s poetry is still preserved and sometimes read — often the portion of his poems that speak eloquently about racism and the double alienation of being a Black Caribbean emigrant to the United States. Since these things are still factors in the 2020s, that supplies relevance to continue to consider them. A poem like his 1919 sonnet “If We Must Die,”   however formal in prosody, presents clear reasons to our current ears.

But McKay is also a passionate love poet.*  Now, to say the least, love is still a contemporary experience, so one might think his love poetry would also get more contemporary exposure. My casual estimate says this hasn’t happened. Yet.

Why not? This poem is significantly old-fashioned, 19th-century-like. Its sentences are poetic in an outdated style, they don’t flow casually in a spoken way. This is a style we might forgive in 19th-century verse if written back then, particularly if the poem is a Hall-of-Fame, “Poetry’s Greatest Hits,” poem — but not so much for a 20th century poet’s less honored selection.

Young Claude McKay

Don’t make the mistake when reading old poetry to think that the poets must be old too. McKay was just 30 when he first published this poem.

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This poem also makes a mistake writers can fall into. McKay seems to think that leaving a surprise for the ending will strengthen the poem — that when the reader finally sees that surprise they will be happy to have waited for the poem’s context.

There are poems that work that way.**  To me, this one doesn’t. Coming upon it, one may not read through the facile but not necessarily compelling nature poem that makes up more than ¾ of the text. Therefore, in my “translation” for today’s performance, I’ve decided to create a refrain out of the poem’s final line, spoiling the surprise but urging the listener to consider the nature and weather report portions of this poem as reports of human desire and inner weather. You’ll hear how it works in the musical performance you can hear below.

Taking liberties like this is one reason I use public domain work: it’s now free for one to do with it what one wants. If you want to read McKay’s work as he intended it, here’s a link to the 1922 version. That link includes its own link to an even earlier published version by McKay, evidence that the poem’s author himself was trying to improve his poem’s impact.

Writers: if you are ever writing a surprise-ending piece, if you ever are withholding something from your reader or listener because you think it’ll be a grand or witty “Aha!” moment at the end, consider the alternative. The alternative here, the bringing out the key context that the poem’s speaker is viewing his summer night and morning “Blind with hunger for your love,” strengthens listener engagement I think, and it lets the listener see that the speaker/singer is just as attracted to the early rain-storm, sleepless-night portion of the weather, as the “miracle” of the subsequent sunny morning which is so incongruent with their present feelings. I’ve doubled down on that revision by making the newly refrained line the title too. ”Summer Morn in New Hampshire,”  as McKay titled it, is too specific yet generic in my hindsight judgement.

I did my best with the musical performance of this as a song. I enjoyed playing my big, heavy, 20-plus-year-old 12-string Guild guitar and weaving in the rest of a quartet of ringing and raining instruments. It’s not a humble-brag, but a statement of the song’s potential to say that this piece would benefit from a higher-skilled singer than I am. Perhaps my voice’s approximations can be heard as bringing an imperfect human immediacy to the words? You can hear the performance with a graphic audio player below (if you see that). No player?  This is a hyperlink that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Let me leave this final point to a footnote. Best as can be determined, Claude McKay’s erotic connections seem to have been with men. Given the homophobia of his time — or perhaps from artistic choice — McKay has written this poem, as he has many of his love poems, in an entirely genderless manner.

**This poem isn’t a sonnet, but it is “sonnet-ish,” and the popular English/Shakespearean sonnet conventionally expects a somewhat surprising summation in its final couplet.

Claude McKay’s America

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

As we enter into the weekend celebrating American Independence Day on July 4th, I thought I’d put together some poetry about the American experiment. While not unprecedented, this is a complex time to be doing that. We are clearly in troubled times, and while I myself am as troubled as the times, I can still try to grasp what some others in their troubles and troubled times have chosen to say about America.

Let me start off with what a particular immigrant had to say almost exactly 100 years ago. The immigrant was Claude McKay, a Black man who came from Jamaica in 1912. Now of course, the presence in the then English colony of Jamaica of a man of African descent can be traced to the violent and involuntary diaspora of the slave trade before McKay’s time, but in his own lifetime, as an immigrant, McKay chose to come to America.

By the time he wrote this poem, first published in 1920, a number of then current events would have been impressed upon his thoughts. He first landed at the Tuskegee Institute in the de jure segregated American south, as close to the time of American slavery and the Civil War as we are to Martin Luther King and Woodstock today. He eventually traveled to the onset of the Harlem Renaissance in New York as well has visiting London and Russia. The life of a Black man was complicated by racism in all these places. Furthermore, if we are to apply the 21st century term “intersectionality,” McKay was working class, gay, and a committed Leftist.

Troubled times? The Palmer Raids and the original “Red Scare” imprisoned or deported many. The now better-known* and understood series of race riots and other acts of terrorism in the service of racial oppression were raging. Even in black and leftist circles, issues of black sexuality were a third rail, and McKay touched that rail.

And, as we now all know, 1918-1919 was also the time of the last great worldwide epidemic.

Given this background, as you listen to or read McKay’s sonnet “America”  you may be surprised that this cri de cœur is as nuanced as it is. In the three quatrains before the closing couplet McKay is essentially making the case that he’s energized by being at a time and place when these evils are present and unmasked to confront. I’ll personally extend his statement: The American Experiment is this. It’s not the absence of evil, our country was never an Eden. That we are still fighting for our ideals of openness, opportunity, and equality under the law is evidence of our frailty—and our stubbornness.

McKay America

Tragic persistence of metaphor: in 1920 McKay would paraphrase “I can’t breathe.”

 

Now what to make of McKay’s closing couplet, the turn the poem takes there as many a sonnet does? My first reading was that this is just the judgment of history: Babylon will always fall. Ozymandias leaves so fast he forgot to pack his trunk. That’s the clear reading of the 13th line.

A final line follows though. I think McKay the prophet here might have meant this too in his warning: we must change to extend our republic’s life, that all is at risk—even if every human, and every civilization, like every artist, will fail. Did we change from his time to extend our experiment? I believe we did. Are we called, are we in need of, more, further, change today? Well, what I think is less important that what you think, particularly if you are younger.

The player to hear my performance of McKay’s sonnet as a song with acoustic guitar is below. Is this the only statement for the 4th of July? No, I’ll be back soon with a reading from another American prophet.

 

 

 

*I was a history and civics nerd as a young person. I can tell you there was next to nothing to read about the racially charged riots of the WWI period until this century unless one knew to dig into primary sources from that time. The more distributed evil of lynching was acknowledged to some degree, but even when urban unrest returned less than 50 years later in the United States during The Sixties, I can’t recall a single pundit or think piece that referenced these events of the post WWI era.