{"id":176424181,"date":"2013-08-19T00:43:03","date_gmt":"2013-08-19T05:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/?p=176424181"},"modified":"2013-08-19T00:43:03","modified_gmt":"2013-08-19T05:43:03","slug":"pov-the-black-poet-as-canon-maker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/2013\/08\/19\/pov-the-black-poet-as-canon-maker\/","title":{"rendered":"POV: The Black Poet as Canon-Maker"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"poetry<\/a><\/p>\n

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ESSAY<\/p>\n

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The Black Poet as Canon-Maker<\/span><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n

\"langston<\/a>
\nLangston Hughes,\u00a0New Negro Poets<\/em>, and American poetry’s segregated past.<\/span><\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

BY\u00a0ELIZABETH ALEXANDER<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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\nWe all have \u201cour\u201d Langstons, the Langstons usually first encountered in childhood through poetry. The work of\u00a0Langston Hughes<\/span><\/a>\u00a0has for several generations of readers helped form a sense of an American poetics and the possibilities of African American literature. Especially for many young black readers of more than one generation, Hughes\u2019s work presents a \u201crace-pride\u201d moment par excellence. He is \u201cour\u201d poet laureate, our \u201cShakespeare in Harlem,\u201d our Negro man of letters who made his living by the word and who articulated racial issues and strivings through a lens of true love for black people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to being the best-known, most-read, and most frequently taught African American and, in many cases, American poet, Langston Hughes is also the rare poet for whom one could easily conjure a picture. Think of those lovely early studio portraits, or any number of later images: the photograph with a cigarette dangling from his mouth; at the typewriter from the cover of\u00a0Selected Poems<\/em>; or the famous photo of the Negro busboy poet, newly \u201cdiscovered\u201d by Vachel Lindsay; or the picture of him in profile and quietly joyful on a Senegalese beach at the 1966 World African Arts Conference in Dakar. We even call him \u201cLangston,\u201d as though something in that face and those poems has invited us to do so.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of all of the genres that he wrote in, it is foremost as a poet that we remember Hughes. This is not because he was a better or more prolific poet than he was, say, a playwright, or that he didn\u2019t accomplish as much in the Jess B. Simple stories. Certainly by 1926, for example, when he published the influential essay \u201cThe Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,\u201d he was making a name for himself in other forms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the face of the poet is the face that stuck, and Hughes himself held that identity dear. In the introduction to\u00a0Poems from Black Africa<\/em>, he wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n

Traditionally, poets are lyric historians. From the days of the bards and troubadours, the songs of the poets have been not only songs, but oftenrecords<\/em>\u00a0of the most moving events, the deepest thoughts and most profound emotional currents of their times. To understand Africa today, it is wise to listen to what its poets say\u2014those who put their songs down on paper as well as those who only speak or sing them.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hughes saw poetry as a representative genre of a people, and he touted its actual power. In 1965, toward the end of his life as that new era in black politics and culture bloomed and flamed, he wrote an introduction for a children\u2019s poetry booklet put out by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This little\u00a0ars poetica<\/em>articulated what he believed poetry could be:<\/span><\/p>\n

Poetry possesses the power of worriation. Poetry can both delight and disturb. It can interest folks. It can upset folks. Poetry can convey both pleasure and pain. And poetry can make people think. If poetry makes people think, it might make them think constructive thoughts, even thoughts about how to change themselves, their town and their state for the better. Some poems, like many of the great verses in the Bible, can make people think about changing all mankind, even the whole world. Poems, like prayers, possess power.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By the second half of his career, Hughes was indisputably the poet laureate of African American letters. He edited numerous anthologies in different genres. In 1949 he and his great friend, Arna Bontemps, published\u00a0The Poetry of the Negro 1746\u20141949<\/em>, which they then revised at the end of Hughes\u2019s life. In 1956 he published\u00a0A Pictorial History of the Negro in America<\/em>, with Milton Melzer, and in 1958,\u00a0Famous Negro Heroes of America<\/em>. The legendary African magazine\u00a0Drum<\/em>, which was published out of Johannesburg, asked him to judge their short-story contest in 1954, which began a period of deep involvement with African literature and its dissemination. In 1960 he edited\u00a0African Treasury: Articles, Essays, Stories, Poems by Black Africans<\/em>, and in 1963,\u00a0Poems from Black Africa, Ethiopia, and Other Countries<\/em>. Perhaps his best-known anthology was the 1967 publication,\u00a0The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Little has been written about Langston Hughes the anthologizer, his role as a shaper of African American culture as well as a maker of it. His lifelong encouragement of younger writers is well known. But more ambitiously, his supporting impulse also represents a move to shape American literature by making the work of black writers available, and to shape African American poetry by putting forth a canon that would articulate a literature that grew and developed dramatically over the course of Hughes\u2019s life. Hughes-as-anthologizer demonstrates his participation in the making of the context in which his own work would be read and placed as well as his responsibility to his literary community. And his edited collection\u00a0New Negro Poets: USA<\/em>, which was published in 1964 after a long and noteworthy incubation, allows us to think about African American canon formation at the beginning of a decade of dramatic change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What follows is the story of\u00a0New Negro Poets (NNP)<\/em>, assembled by researching the extensive Hughes correspondence in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Hughes died in 1967;\u00a0NNP<\/em>\u00a0was his last solo take on the African American literary scene and a case study of how even the clearest cultural vision can become distorted on its way to public availability. The final book is never what it starts out to be, and the case ofNNP<\/em>\u00a0speaks to the times, to white visions of black poetry, and to the making of a cultural anthology by a black poet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Anthologies require a tremendous amount of work of a certain kind, and to succeed they must implicitly tell a story. The act of consolidating and then distilling invites aesthetic and political choices at every turn, the kinds of choices that subsequently come to appear inevitable when we read the anthology and the editorial hand is made invisible. In his essay \u201cA History of American Poetry Anthologies,\u201d Alan C. Golding discusses Elihu Hubbard Smith\u2019s\u00a0American Poems, Selected and Original<\/em>, which was published in 1793 and represented the first anthology of American poetry. Golding writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s Federalism underlies what he saw as the use of his anthology: to build America\u2019s sense of identity by gathering an independent national literature to match and strengthen the country\u2019s newly achieved political independence. This particular political identity which Smith wanted that literature to embody is not what actually evolved, of course. Nevertheless, his and other early American poetry anthologies . . . did share this common goal. The term \u201cAmerican literature,\u201d rarely used before the 1780s, became commonplace after the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Magazines opened their pages to a flood of American writing, as their editors set out crusading pleas for the creation of a \u201cnational\u201d literature. . . . [In the nineteenth century] the country still felt an urgent need to assert that it had an indigenous poetry recognizably different from English poetry.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This analysis can be extrapolated to African American anthologies, particularly poetry collections. In his 1921 introduction to\u00a0The Book of American Negro Poetry<\/em>, James Weldon Johnson states plainly:<\/span><\/p>\n

A people may become great by many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the African American context, \u201cthe tradition,\u201d as such, was still in its youth. Johnson\u2019s 1921 offering appeared just forty years before Hughes so enthusiastically embarked on\u00a0NNP<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Not all poets choose to choose, which is to say, many poets have no interest at all in the specific work and responsibility of putting together an anthology. Mollifying the tender feeling of fellow Negro poets is a difficult business. The Chicago and Detroit poet Margaret Danner, for example, with whom Hughes corresponded from 1944 until his death, wrote to Hughes on 22 April 1960, concerned about poems she hoped would be included in\u00a0New Negro Poets<\/em>. In all capital letters, her missive reads, \u201cNOT TO BE INCLUDED IN YOUR ANTHOLOGY WOULD HURT ME VERY MUCH.\u201d After her place in the anthology has been assured, she sends a telegram: \u201cI\u2019m so happy that you like me sweet and fat love Margaret.\u201d (3 March 1963) When the book comes out, she writes, \u201cI am very proud to be included. [But] I wish they had chosen some of my later work.\u201d (4 May 1964) Two years later, when Hughes and Bontemps are revising their 1949 black poetry anthology she writes: \u201cPlease publish new poems and please correct my birthplace,\u201d which was listed as Kentucky in\u00a0New Negro Poets<\/em>. \u201cI was born in Chicago, Illinois. I have documents to prove this if others need them. I am sure you don\u2019t.\u201d (19 October 1966)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Amiri Baraka<\/span><\/a>, then Leroi Jones, also corresponds with Hughes about his selections inNew Negro Poets<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Got word from Indiana a couple days ago that you are using poems of mine in yr ant\u2019y. I\u2019m very happy you are, and that the thing is finally going to come out. But one thing, how come you using those old poems? I\u2019ve got thousands of poems, &c. but I suppose you\u2019re supposed to use what you want. But another thing strikes me as really curious. Why use only that small part of the Lanie Poo poem?? I\u2019d much rather you used another poem, rather than cut that away like that. Is the other material objectionable because of the language? Please let me hear from you, maybe I can send you a substitute poem, or a couple of substitutes?? (27 October 1963)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hughes has George Bass write a diplomatic reply to say that the anthology has been three years in the making, and that it is being directed \u201cat the education market\u2014high schools and colleges. This prevents the use of any \u2018profane and\/or obscene\u2019 words . . . that is, words so defined by the public\u2019s mind . . . the folk who buy the books.\u201d Bass also tells Jones that the type has already been set (29 October 1963). These negotiations are part of the territory of anthology editing, and not everyone is up to the particular challenge.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The road to\u00a0NNP<\/em>\u00a0begins with Hughes\u2019s editing of the Winter 1950 issue of the poetry quarterly\u00a0Voices<\/em>\u00a0as a \u201cNegro poets issue.\u201d Inclusion of more established poets, such as\u00a0Waring Cuney<\/span><\/a>, Melvin Tolson, Jessie Fauset,\u00a0Gwendolyn Brooks<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0Robert Hayden<\/span><\/a>, and Georgia Douglas Johnson, would not fit under the umbrella of \u201cNew Negro\u201d a decade later. By 1960 there was a clear sense of an old guard as well as a vanguard in African American poetry. The work was abundant and in flux, and it was high time for a \u201csecond generation\u201d of black poetry anthologies that would not include foremothers and forefathers, such as Jupiter Hammon,\u00a0Phillis Wheatley<\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0Paul Laurence Dunbar<\/span><\/a>. Even Hughes\u2019s own generation was attaining elder status, so a new black poetry would catch hold of a nascent explosion. As Rosey Pool, the Dutch Holocaust survivor and editor of the 1962 British-published anthology\u00a0Beyond the Blues<\/em>, wrote of those years, \u201cThere were black poets everywhere\u2014an avalanche of creative power. It was like\u00a0living<\/em>\u00a0a huge volume of BLACK AND UNKNOWN BARDS.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the early 1960s most American poetry anthologies were still segregated. Walter Lowenfels\u2019s\u00a0Poets of Today: A New American Anthology<\/em>\u00a0featured an introductory poem by Langston Hughes. In Lowenfels\u2019s introduction he wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n

While there are now in print two recent anthologies of Negro poets, most general anthologies of American poetry exclude Negroes. In a review of what I called 15 years ago \u201cthe Oxford Book of (White) American Verse,\u201d I drew attention to segregation in poetry. Research in this field shows no improvement since then. Apparently other editors do not consider the kind of poems by the 20 Negroes I have included to be poetry. My choice has been determined not by color but by what I respond to when \u201cI hear the voice of America singing.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The time was right for anthologies to perform the corrective function of making black poetry more widely available.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Excerpt from \u201cThe Black Poet as Canon-Maker: Langston Hughes and the Road toNew Negro Poets: USA<\/em>\u201d Copyright 2004 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted from\u00a0The Black Interior<\/em>\u00a0with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Originally Published: February 2, 2007<\/span><\/div>\n
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<\/div>\n
>via:\u00a0http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/article\/177377<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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  ESSAY The Black Poet as Canon-Maker Langston Hughes,\u00a0New Negro Poets, and American poetry’s segregated past.   BY\u00a0ELIZABETH ALEXANDER We all have \u201cour\u201d Langstons, the Langstons usually first encountered in childhood through poetry. The work of\u00a0Langston Hughes\u00a0has for several generations of readers helped form a sense of an American poetics and the possibilities of African […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[6],"tags":[4,12,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176424181"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176424181"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176424181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176424212,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176424181\/revisions\/176424212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176424181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176424181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176424181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}