Twenties

Langston Hughes’ “Cabaret”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Before we close the book on National Poetry Month and International Jazz Day, here’s a musical performance of a poem by Langston Hughes. I didn’t think I’d be able to complete it today — but the opportunity arose, and it’s more than appropriate for both observations.

Langston Hughes was one of the founders of Jazz poetry, and that style of reading poetry that interacts with a musical accompaniment (even if it’s not sung) is an influence for some of the performances you’ve heard here in this Project. I can’t say what year Hughes first performed his poetry that way, but there’s another meaning to Jazz poetry without a band: poetry that writes about the experience of Jazz music itself. And Hughes was repeatedly doing that in the early 1920s.

Decades later, a 1950s Hughes reads his 1920s poem “The Weary Blues” in front of a Jazz combo

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This, a combination that appreciated Jazz, was not a sure thing in the early 1920s. Afro-American intellectuals and cultural critics were not universally fond of Jazz and Blues music, these great Afro-American Modernist musical forms arising right under their noses. There were reasons: it was associated with drugs, drink, criminality, and sexual promiscuity — and none of that promoted Black achievement and excellence in their minds. And some young white folks were taking an interest in Jazz for those very reasons. Tut-tut voices from both racial camps were observing their young people and thinking it was all about mindless, hedonistic partying. Let me repeat myself: when the last decade to be called “The Twenties” was called “The Jazz Age,” it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

I’d suspect this isn’t widely known to many readers. Jazz, to our 21st century Twenties, might be felt as supposed-to-be-good-for-you-but-boring-art music made up of too many weird chords and snobbish old men with a fetish for instruments you blow into. If we take it too seriously, too often now, the problem in the 1920s was they didn’t think it had a serious bone in its body.

Maybe it helped that Langston Hughes was a young man, a teenager when the 1920s began. He appreciated things in Jazz and Blues that even his Afro-American elders didn’t see. He knew it could be a balm to pain and disappointment, its expression and expiation — and he could see the art in it, an art to wrap into his poetry. This small poem of his, published in 1923 in the W.E.B Du Bois/NAACP The Crisis magazine, hears something others couldn’t: he hears a Jazz band cry — or rather his poem reports a woman heard this. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem.

Even in the shortness of his poem, note the dialectic here. The band, earlier in the night, had dancers, “vulgar dancers” it says. The older cultural gatekeepers at the Crisis would agree as they accepted this poem, “I see the young poet is aware of the dangerous moral unseriousness of the Jazz hounds.”

Why could Hughes hear what others didn’t? Well, he’s a great poet, and a poet that wrote often and empathetically of other people’s experiences. There’s another possible element. Do modern ears hear the poem’s second line differently than his readers in the last Twenties? “They say a jazz-band’s gay” he wrote. “Gay” in the 1920s would have clearly meant “happy.” As far as scholarship understands this, gay=homosexual seems to have come into use a bit later, perhaps in the 1930s, and to general readers, that meaning emerged in an even later era.

Hughes’ own sexuality is not something we know a lot about. Some say he was gay, some say he was asexual. One thing I get from reading Hughes’ early poetry is that he’s hearing and telling his stories not just from a stereotypical straight masculine viewpoint. Is it his anima that’s the she who “heard the jazz-band sob” in the poem? Or is he just listening to a woman?

Well, my performance of Langston Hughes’ “Cabaret”  is ready to be heard. Unlike the last piece, I made no pretense of Jazz music as it’s classically understood this time, but I do throw in some weird chord extensions. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player to be seen? The dancers have left, and some ways of reading this blog suppress the display of the audio player. If so, use this alternative, a link that will open a new tab with its own player.

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Distance Blues (Theory)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s another woman writing very compressed verse about life and love around a hundred years ago, during that last decade we called “The Twenties.” She’s Dorothy Parker, and you’ll often find her work filed under “humorist.” As I said a few years ago when first talking here about Parker, I suspect that classification tended to prevent her work being discussed as poetry.

Young Dorothy Parker

Let me extend Charles Mingus: If Dorothy Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead serious romantic poets

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That label, used to set humor aside from “important work,” like the idea that verse sung with music is unlikely to be real poetry, seems not just needlessly exclusionary, but ahistorical. The western classical canon didn’t make this distinction when the verse was in Greek or Latin. Maybe translation slows down the appreciation of the jokes in Catullus for example? Perhaps Parker’s real fault (other than being a woman who wasn’t publishing in poetry journals in this era) was in being seen as “only” a humorist, and one that tended to write, like several other popular female poets of her time, about the abundant absurdities in human romantic relationships.*

This April I finished my several-year serial-performance of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,”  a poem that wants to, indeed its innovative design is to, talk about a wide variety of things. Its middle part, like our middle parts, is very concerned with just such human miss-connections — but for good or ill that section is surrounded by an elaborate series of scenes time-adrift and spiritual that wear the mask of tragedy and religious/academic vestments. Does Eliot ever make you laugh at the absurdities? Well, there are a few sly jokes in it — but more in contrast, “The Waste Land”  is long, it’s elaborate, and for me it remains powerful assuming you can accept the way Eliot sung his suite of songs printed silent on paper. Is elaboration the superior art? You tell me. I think it has its powers, as does concision. Are we less likely to be moved or changed by laughter or tears? Again, you tell me, I don’t know.

Where is it that Parker fails if we are not to consider her short pieces, printed in glossy magazines as witty amusements, as actual poetry? Are her observations merely trite, just a chuckle the first time we hear them, and unrewarding beyond that? Does humor outdate faster than solemn meditations?

I’ll sing a couple, and you decide. Today’s audio piece is an old recording where I combined two Parker poems, “Distance”  and “Theory,”  with a bit of acoustic guitar blues feeling. Combining short pieces is a tactic taken by several of the Modernists of Parker’s era:** the idea is that short, epigrammatic poems can gain power if presented as a facet in a collection of other short verses. The player gadget will appear below for some of you, and if you don’t see it, this highlighted hyperlink will open a new tab or window to allow you to hear it.

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*Parker also ridicules patriarchal attitudes, which might have been minimized as mere jokes without consequence to assuage male privilege, but she’s also rough on some female-gendered behavior. This can be read by some as both-sides-ism, but maybe there’s also a reading that says it’s a more essential, radical critic of gender.

**I’ve been thinking about that tactic, used by poets Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, Edgar Lee Masters, and others in the early Modernist era, and just now I recognized that the common practice of Blues singers of combining as series of floating or not directly related Blues verses has at least surface similarity. Perhaps this subconsciously led me to combining two Parker poems in my bluesy singing of them — but it could also be for a practical reason, one that may have obtained for some of the Blues singers: it made a piece out of shorter material that reaches a longer, desired length.