I've been a pretty hardcore fan these last couple weeks of playoffs. I spent games 4,5 and 6 downtown and CBC plaza, and had a wonderful time at each. Game 5 was an especially amazing experience, due entirely to the fact that we WON! So many high-fives, WOO's and happy faces.
Now, my reason for talking hockey is because its been my reason for neglecting this blog! It is also the reason that I don't have the brainpower to write a new one now (the only thing my brain can come up with is: GO CANUCKS GO!), however, I want to post something.
So for those of you who are willing to read it, I offer to you my favourite paper of my undergraduate degree. Its also one of the shorter ones I had the opportunity to write, so its not too painful to get through. I wrote this as my term paper for English 462, which was listed as 20th Century British and Irish Literature, but was actually mostly American Authors of the 20th Century, most of them expatriates (so Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot...that whole gang). I took it with Professor John Cooper, who had a funny and sometimes terrible teaching style, but who is a very neat guy, and very famous/respected in his field.
My paper focusses on the Harlem Renaissance portion of the course, and I was extremely pleased to have the chance to bring some of my music background into my lit studies!
Enjoy!
“The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm, honey”
The interactions between jazz and the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance
The Modernist movement of the twentieth century was one that took hold of all arts forms, and was therefore, unsurprisingly shaped by all of them. Along with this shared contribution to the movement, the arts of this time also interacted with each other. One such interaction is that between music and literature. More specifically, a compelling connection can be seen between jazz music and African American literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes is a poet that exemplifies the way in which jazz can be translated into literature, especially in his poem “The Weary Blues”, and poem collection (to be read as one whole) Montage of a Dream Deferred. Hughes’ unique techniques succeed in creating a poetic voice, or rather, voices of his community, while expressing clearly modernist ideas. I will argue that jazz has an undeniable impact on Hughes’ poetry, and discuss the way this relationship affected African-American culture, and not only the Harlem Renaissance, but Modernism as a whole.
Before examining the way in which jazz influences Hughes’ poetry, it is important to develop an understanding of the features of jazz reflected in Modernist poetry. While determining an exact starting point for jazz, or a precise definition is close to impossible, it is a painless enough task to select the pertinent aspects of jazz when referring to it’s affect on Modernism. Firstly, the African-American roots in jazz music are extremely significant in understanding the music’s place in poetry. Jazz is often seen as a variation or development of black spiritual traditions, and also finds origins in the blues. In an even simpler manner, many aspects of early African drumming, such as syncopation, polyrhythm and the “swung note” can be traced into jazz music. These characteristics, and others, as they found their way into jazz music, likewise found their way into Harlem Renaissance poetry. Among other “jazz traits” to be found in this poetry are those associated with jazz improvisation.
The belief that Langston Hughes, as I have already noted, was the most successful at translating jazz into literature is one shared by many scholars. John Gennari claims that while other African American poets were aware of the music and its poetic capabilities, Hughes was the only one to take jazz seriously. Robert O’Brien Hokanson makes a similar argument, stating Hughes was different from other African American modernists due to his skill at incorporating jazz dynamics into poetry. The first poem I will discuss to show the deep connection between Hughes’ writing and jazz is “The Weary Blues”.
The setting of the poem is relevant, as scholars including Gunter H. Lenz, have argued that the Harlem Renaissance tendency to construct their poetry within a jazz club or cabaret creates a “symbolic space”, in which their “new, modern urban black culture and community” could manifest itself. The content of the poem is also, of course, very important when examining the influence of jazz on Hughes’ poetry. Not only is the subject of the poem a jazz pianist, but the verse too is bursting with diction of musical forms and terms, such as “syncopated”(1) and “tone” (17). The poem contains the lyrics of this blues man’s song, as well as description of the other sounds he makes. The “abstract sequences of sound” (Patterson 680) in Hughes’ work, such as the “Thump, thump, thump” found in line 23 of “The Weary Blues” help solidify their musicality. The repetition of “O Blues!” in the poem is also reminiscent of brass shots that would be heard in practically any big band tune of the time. The imagery of movement in the poem, with an emphasis on the pianist’s “lazy sway” (6), possibly reflects Langston’s understanding that jazz is not easily experienced through words- much like the way he may have had trouble articulating the exacts of his Harlem community. Hughes is able to express his community, however, through jazz and by drawing, as Hokanson notes, “less on the centuries of literary tradition behind him [as many other modernists would have done] than on the vivid life around him”. “The Weary Blues” is a clear example of how jazz imagery and dialect make their way into Hughes’ poetry. This technique is developed even more in Hughes’ later collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred, where jazz is not only the basis for the content, but the long poem’s very structure.
Hughes’ Montage is a collection of many short poems, including “Dream Boogie”, “Theme for English B”, and “Harlem”. Like “The Weary Blues”, these poems are chalk full of jazz imagery, but possibly their most interesting feature is the way in which they emulate the form of solo choruses in a jazz standard, how jazz becomes not only the subject matter or metaphor, but the “formative principle” (Lenz 274). In his own introduction to the collection, Hughes writes:
“This poem of contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of a community in transition”.
As noted above, an important feature of jazz improvisation is the dialogue that takes places between soloists. In this collection, Hughes plays with this idea by having multiple voices in his poem, and yet blending them into one. He achieves this through repetition of certain lines and words (again, borrowing from jazz tradition) and the motif of musical forms. Hokanson notes that while Hughes’ individual voices “highlight distinctive nuances and perspectives of Harlem”, they also “remain rooted in a communal context, resulting in a poetic version of the collective improvisation of jazz”. This form of soloing over the same changes, but representing often hugely contrasting ideas, is one that a jazz musician or listener would be innately familiar with. It is also important to note that Hughes bases his poems off the form of be-bop music, which came to be as a revolt against the commercialization of big-band swing.
The form of each individual poem is also important, as the line breaks and use of italics are also indicative of a be-bop form. Anita Patterson suggests that these stylistic elements also “show the ambivalence and animosity of an African American speaker trying to explain the meaning of the music to a Euro-American listener” (681). Again, we see this pattern of difficulty in bringing both jazz and culture into words. Montage of a Dream Deferred is an excellent example of how Hughes incorporates jazz into his poetry. It is with this technique that he is able to have such an impact on the Harlem Renaissance, and the African Americans living it.
Hughes’ use of jazz in his poetry is incredibly important in that it creates a voice and a place for the African American community of which he was a part. One of the fundamental features of the Harlem Renaissance (and in fact, the very thing that allowed it to emerge) is the re-envisioning and breaking down of ethical/racial boundaries. Hughes felt there was a “need to include African American musical traditions (jazz) into this interaction” (Hokanson). He attempted (and I believe, succeeded) to use jazz to bridge the gap between largely oral, folkloric African American traditions, and what could be considered the “privileged” art form of literature (Patterson 658). Lenz argues that the jazz-influenced dialogue between the poems in Montage is representative of the dynamic, expressive quality of black culture, and acts to affirm a “viable clack urban ghetto culture and public sphere” (274). In his poem “Theme for English B”, one of Hughes’ individual voices makes a striking statement on ethical and racial relations:
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white –
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Here we can see that Hughes hopes to create a distinct, unique African American voice, one that can equally contribute to the larger American whole- much like unique improvisations of a jazz tune contribute to the song as a whole. One of the most significant and lasting aspects of Hughes’ poetry is its ability to speak for and to the community of Harlem during the mid-twentieth century. He achieves this, in part, through his jazz-infused imagery and form.
Just as the Harlem Renaissance fits under the larger movement of Modernism, the influence of jazz too can be seen as relating to general Modernist ideas. Scholars have noted several traits of jazz that reflect Modernist poetics, and many jazz musicians that can be grouped with the well-known Modernist artists and writers. Gennari relates jazz to Modernism in three significant ways. First of all, he considers jazz music to be in a state of “continuous becoming”, which I feel can be easily linked to Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being”. Second, he notes the way in which the “shifting rhythms, sliding harmonies, and instrumental juxtapositions [of jazz] simultaneously convey both the fragmentation and the wholeness of time and sound”. This idea is quite similar to the experimental treatment of time and space found in much of Modernist literature. Gennari finally notes, in a specific comparison, “the 4/4 swing of Count Basie rhythm section achieved a kind of understated, spare elegance not unlike the pared down simplicity of Ernest Hemingway’s prose”. Along the same lines of equating musicians as important modernists is his claim that “Louis Armstrong’s vanguard techniques are…no less central to a definition of twentieth-century Modernism than Picasso’s” or Phillip Larkin’s assertion that Charlie Parker, Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso are equal “Pioneers” of Modernism (Leggett 264). I agree with these scholars that jazz musicians deserve a place of equal honour in the Modernist movement beside the writers and artists. After all, doesn’t jazz embody Pound’s motto of “making it new”? Charlie Parker’s rewrites of “Cherokee” into “KoKo” or “How High the Moon” into “Ornithology” are the musical versions of Pound’s Homeric influence in the Cantos, or his rewriting of ancient Chinese poetry. Although it may not be as common a conception as say, the interaction between Modernist literature and Modernist visual art, upon examination it is clear that music and literature share a similar creative relationship.
The poetry of Langston Hughes offers a clear, precise example of the way jazz influenced the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes uses jazz to shape both the content and form of his poems, and in doing so creates a distinct, inter-connected voice for, and of his community. Many characteristics of jazz, specifically those that came to the fore in the development of be-bop, can be easily translated into Modernist ideas. This ability for music and literature to cross boundary lines and be understood in each other terms is yet another reason that Modernism remains such a unique movement in literary history.
Works Cited
Gennari, John "Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies." Black American Literature Forum 25.3 (1991): 449-523. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2009.
Hokanson, Robert O'Brien "Jazzing It Up: The Be-Bop Modernism of Langston Hughes." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 31.4 (1998): 61-82. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2009.
Leggett, B. J. "Larkin's Blues: Jazz and Modernism." Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 42.2 (1996): 258-276. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2009.
Lenz, Günter H. "'The Riffs, Runs, Breaks, and Distortions of the Music of a Community in Transition'-Redefining African American Modernism and the Jazz Aesthetic in Langston Hughes' Montage of a Dream Deferred and Ask Your Mama." Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs 44.1-2 (2003): 269-282. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2009.
Patterson, Anita "Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric: The Poetry of Langston Hughes." Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 61.4 (2000): 651-682. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2009.
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