POETS Day! Moments in The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

The purpose of POETS Day is to follow the acronym and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work mid Friday afternoon, read a little poetry and enjoy life. Free time is always better when it’s illicitly gotten. Towards that end, in the past I’ve encouraged untruths and subterfuge, recommended apps that show incoming hospital calls on your caller ID, invented religious exemptions, and advised on recruiting co-conspirators.

I recently picked up a copy of The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, billed as “a World War II-era document created by the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to provide guidance to resistance groups on how to disrupt enemy operation through covert means.”

There’s a lot in it about slowing down deliberative processes; recommending committees, enthusiastically suggesting an idea be fully explored into oblivion, and otherwise crippling organizations by inviting bureaucratic involvement. There are instructions for stopping up toilets too. I confess to being less than wowed by most of the entries. I expected it to be more like The Dangerous Book for Boys but with Tatiana Romanova in tow.

I’m not sure how helpful the book will be towards POETS Day purposes but we didn’t lose the war, so here goes.

“(8) Cause motor stoppage or inefficiency by applying dust mixed with grease to the face of the armature so that it will not make proper contact.”

To quote Charles Bronson’s in The Great Escape, “I don’t’ know. I wasn’t going to use it myself.”

Howsoever you decide to worm your way out, seize the afternoon and have a good time. Baseball’s up and running. Bars are open. Maybe hit the gym or have a swim. It’s your time. First, give some verse a try. It’s good for the soul.

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Poems have great lines. That shouldn’t be controversial. I like to think that my favorite poems are uniform in purpose; that the poet uses “no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something,” as Pound wrote in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” Every phrase works towards an end and in that effort, the whole of the composition is of equal importance. The shaft is every bit as much of the spear as the tip, and all. That doesn’t mean I don’t have favorite parts.

I wish I could say that we read too many “Collected Works” opus style books of verse now as opposed to smaller collections, discrete volumes. We don’t read enough poetry at all so no format claims an eyeball surplus, but we seemingly slant towards big collections. Most “Collected Works” I’ve come across take pains to group poems that were published together, but not always and rarely exhaustively. I have a copy of Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems. It’s laid out chronologically, so all the works set in complimentary order for publication as Ariel (first by Plath, then by Ted Hughes, and recently in another edition by piecing together Plath’s notes) are returned to their littermates, scattered about under the sterile headings “1960,” “1962,” and “1963.” The Ariel concept is lost.

Just like on an album or in a baseball lineup, a poem’s placement matters. Proper layout reveals unexpected purposes. Weaknesses are shown to be integral to something larger.

When you read about Langston Hughes, you see adjectives like “melodic” and “rhythmic” tossed around. “Vibrant.” They’re apt. He brought a blues and jazz sensibility to his writing that’s electrifying. He claimed influence from Walt Whitman, which is weird to me because I like most of what I’ve read from Hughes and dislike most of what I’ve read from Whitman. He also claimed Carl Sandburg. That jumps out in places.

If you can, get ahold of Hughes first published volume, The Weary Blues. It’s short; tight, seventy poems or so, and makes for a nice bit of afternoon. From the titular poem:

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

He starts off slowly. Lento or Adagio are probably what someone more versed than me in music would suggest I call it. Once we’re gently drawn in, the tempo waxes and wanes and waxes and wanes. Here, from “Dream Variations”:

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! whirl! whirl!
Till the quick day is done.

Because he’s set the world in motion, when he stops, freezes an image, it’s unusually effective. I think the next poem would be lost without context. As it is, it’s a brief stagger. You’re pulled from the crowd for a sec. The image doesn’t preclude the sweeping nightlife tapestry woven by the poems it shares space with. The music still plays and the dancers still dance but for an instant attention is tunneled to one face and in a flash you see her past, present, and future.

Young Prostitute

Her dark brown face
Is like a withered flower
On a broken stem.
Those kind come cheap in Harlem
So they say.

There are three “Young” poems in the book.

Young Singer

One who sings “chansons vulgaries”
In a Harlem cellar
Where the jazz-band plays
From dark to dawn
Would not understand
Should you tell her
That she is like a nymph
For some wild faun.

Young Sailor

He carries
His own strength
And his own laughter,
His own today
And his own hereafter,––
This strong young sailor
Of the wide seas.

What is money for?
To spend, he says.
And wine?
To drink.
And women?
To love.
And today?
For joy.
And tomorrow?
For joy.
And the green sea
For strength,
And the brown land
For laughter.
And nothing hereafter.

They stand apart. The characters described are familiar to most and I get the sense that while the book is in celebration of a specific culture, these three poems are efforts to tie his to a larger world. They invite comparisons. His essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” berates a young black poet for wanting to write universally. The essay doesn’t jibe with Hughes’s poetry in my opinion. Certainly, his work celebrates black people for a black audience, but I don’t get the impression that it’s exclusive. Maybe. Maybe not. Still, encompassing imagery.

The Dover Thrift Editions’ The Weary Blues includes the original 1926 introduction by Hughes’s friend Carl Van Vechten, who spends a deal of his allotted space discussing the poet’s travels. I was particularly happy to read the line “Returning to New York with plenty of money and a monkey,” because it makes me giggle thinking about a giant literary figure pretending away the buyer’s remorse anybody with non-feces colored wallpaper and romantic notions strong enough to momentarily eclipse reason about exotic wildlife is inevitably due.

Van Vechten tells us that Hughes moved around a bit as a child, including a stint with his father in the charmingly put “City of Mexico.” If that was as common as calling it Mexico City in the 1920s, we erred in choosing and need to revisit the decision. Per Van Vechten, “He partially satisfied an insatiable craving to go to sea by signing up with an old ship anchored in the Hudson for the winter. His first real cruise as a sailor carried him to the Canary Islands, the Azores, and the West Coast of Africa.” Next, presumably having disposed of the monkey, he went off to Holland, spent time in Paris, various parts of Italy, and Spain.

A Farewell
Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

With gypsies and sailors,
Wanderers of the hills and seas,
I go to seek my fortune.
With pious folk and fair
I must have a parting.
But you will not miss me,––
You who live between the hills
And have never seen the seas.

He writes about ports, about a woman in red, and water-front streets. These poems should be read together in the sequence laid out by the poet. There’s an ensemble line in the second poem, third if you count the proem. “In a whirling cabaret / Six long-headed jazzers play.”