For Black History Month quite a number of people have been blogging on their favourite/most influential black writers. Ive been too busy to do this so Ill just write a little on how I became a great admirer of Langston Hughes. Id known the anthologised pieces of years, particularly The Weary Blues (which I love), The Negro Speaks of Rivers and the much-anthologised Theme for English B. These made me see Hughes has a good but not a great poet. Then I picked up a scruffy and second-hand American edition of Hughes Selected Poems and, for the first time, I saw the full text of the long poem (or book-length sequence) Montage of a Dream Deferred, first published in 1951. As I read it, my view of Hughes changed and I saw him as one of the great experimental poets of the twentieth century. Montage of a Dream Deferred is exactly what it says - a montage. There are voices, jazz rhythms, even neon signs from an African American community. Its vivid and contains as many different voices as any community. Somewhere in the middle comes Theme for English B and, in this context, the poem is both different and less significant than it seems in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. White anthologisers have selected particular aspects of the African-American experience, often privileging those occasions when it intersects with the white experience and is thus disadvantaged. But when you look at Montage of a Dream Deferred as a whole, you see the richness and variety of the African-American experience as well as the oppression individuals and the community as a whole suffer. You see human beings and you also see what it might be like to walk through the streets of Harlem as an African-American and to hear a diversity of voices. You see the humanity and potential that racism ignores - and its not the narrowed view which the white anthologisers convey. If you can find a copy (and its not so easy in the U.K.) do try to get hold of Montage of a Dream Deferred and see the way Hughes conveys Harlem in sounds, visual effects and poetry. I think this work is at least as important in C20th poetry as The Waste Land and that it still has much to teach poets today.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 07:36:13 +0000
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