Hughes, Brooks, Baraka, Cortez, Waldman, Giorno

 Hughes' "Harlem": For some help unpacking this condensed piece, see the study sheets/exercises (the comments on "Harlem" and "Theme for English B." Understanding how socio-cultural conditions for African Americans in America post WW II relate to the "dream" of the Harlem Renaissance will help explain the ambiguous, disillusioned tone of this poem; it's mixture of militancy and hope. What was that dream, and how did it change? How do you see this tension and ambiguity in the poem's images? it's structure and line breaks? Look closely at contrasting/conflicting details...

The introductory essay on Hughes on PF can also be helpful in dealing with the question of dialect in his earlier poems: Is he stereotyping, or challenging the academic, Anglified verse of other African American poets in the 20s and 30s (when many of these dialect poems were written)--see Countee Cullen's poetry as an eg)--and representing a more "authentic" voice of the lower/working class African-American? Or could the dialect poems be up to something more sophisticated, diacritically marking the dialect (i.e., putting it, figuratively, in quotes), undercutting the stereotypical language with imagery that reveals the emotional and existential realities--the "human condition," as critics have said of Ferlinghetti--of an underclass experience ("Sylvester's Dying Bed" is a good eg.--consider the final image, the rhythmic alteration of the final stanza, and also the smudged image of the "River Jerden" two stanzas earlier)?

Brooks: For secondary sources on Brooks' poetry, check MAP, the introduction on PF, and the Literature Resource Center (KBCC databases). It is also interesting to read Brooks and Hughes together, since, though different in style and sensibility (Brooks deploys ebonics at times, rather than dialect stereotypes), they deal with a similar demographic.

Whether or not you are writing about the particular poem on which a blog is focused, if you are writing about that author's work, review my comments, since the comments may still be helpful.

Baraka, Cortez, Waldman, Giorno

RE Cortez: Consider the influence of jazz on Cortez's poetry; "Jazz Fans Look Back," for eg, though this can apply to other poems, as well: How is the poem Jazz-like? The thing to do is to look "Back" carefully at some of the images, esp. in stanza 2, to see how jazz effects the poem's imagery, rhythms, and structure, and how the poem represents, through its imagery and relationships among images, rhythms and tones, the complexity of jazz, its pain, defiance, and vibrancy. "Wailed," "Screamed," "rebellious metronomes," "militant messages," "Embedded record needles in paint on paper," as well as a kind of screaming laughter like "high-pitched" sax riffs and the implied impact of jazz on speech (think of the writing of this poem) as a product of "infatuated tongues"; contrasted with images such as wearing a Holiday flower, and Ray hitting "bass notes to the last love seat in my bones": how do such images suggest the power and impact of jazz in the 50s-70s, the way it "blew roof off" off conventional music, but also impacted (continues to impact, as the speaker "look[s] back") the attitude and mood of the listener? (Recall also the critical comments from last wk on Hughes' "Harlem," which also comment on the connection between jazz and the militant attitude of some of Hughes' work.). Consider also how the power and aggressiveness of the music is a means of giving voice to African-American experience--not just speaking, in Cortez's poem, but "wailing," screaming, screeching out...

On "There It Is": What is the significance of beginning the poem in medias res (check dictionary.com, Wikipedia, et.)--as if in the middle or perhaps as the conclusion of a larger discussion/public speech/existential situation etc.? Also, what about specific image details such as "exaggerated look," "Stylized look," "decomposed look"...?
Also consider the public mood of address the poem takes--what are the rhetorical features of this?--and significance of the last line, of course.

Also, What do you make of that repetition of "and"? It at first suggests a too neat closure, whereas much of the poem works against such closure? or does it suggest socio-economic entrapment of some sort? I guess I'm wondering if its use is ironic, or fatalistic, or perhaps challenging the notion of formal, poetic closure--a hallmark of conventional, print-bound, should we say "white," Anglo-American poetic tradition...
 

YouTube "Bebop" and a tune like Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" to get a sense of the music

RE Waldman,  "Makeup on Empty Space": We can probably relate to/empathize with the urges, desires, and fears of the speaker in confronting this "empty space," and so in that sense she appeals to a common humanity; also, the poem is philosophically grounded in Buddhism, and the notion that emptiness is all. In many schools of Buddhism the "self," as personal, individual, identity, as well material phenomena (natural and otherwise), is illusory, and so everything is "makeup" on empty space, or void, in this way; of course believing this can be especially frightening for a Western consciousness based in individualism and materialism. It does, also, allow for a great amount of freedom, in that, if we are able to let "Things" go (this includes ideas, beliefs, "Truths" with a big "T"--ideological frameworks--as well as material things), then we are not possessed by our possessions, so to speak. So all (everything we may think of as constituting a stable sense of self in an extant world) is nothing, in this sense, and nothing is everything--the greater sense of being; "impermanence" is a key term. the other leg of this concept is that, since there is no self-coherent identity, everything may interconnect, interpenetrate, with everything else, in an imaginative sense (and certainly quantum physics has shown that this is true at a subatomic, physical level, as well). This is very much the conceptual atmosphere of Snyder's poetry, as well.

Note to how the speaker works through aspects of her personal identity, as a woman, to get through this/re-contextualize/foreground within a consciousness of void/emptiness. Also note how remaining imaginatively/meditatively within the aura of the void allows all things to interpenetrate and at the same time dissolves any sense of permanence, which takes a great deal of effort, concentration and practice--thus the repetitive insistence/persistence of the poem and the key line "Someone was always intruding to make you forget empty space"

The urge toward this sort of (not)self-actualization is often difficult, our minds cluttered with "social-programmed fabrications" (think of Piercy's "Barbie Doll"). There is a sense of the transitoriness of all things, almost a willful arbitrariness (of the self, its image making) "appear" in the poem; what we are left with is the "vow to empty space," underlying it all... The poem is imbued with Buddhist sensibility, in this way. In a sense (a very different sense), I think of what follows the "We" each line/time in Brooks "We Real Cool."

Baraka, "The Incident": Think about the poem's hovering between abstract and literal; given the murderous reality underlying this event, why might this be significant, in terms of the "human condition" the poem may be representing? How might the grey light, etc, as metaphors--for what? A key line/image also comes at the end of stanza 3, where the fall takes a definite metaphoric turn, since "everything tumbled blindly with him" as he fell through a "darkness darker than his soul" (lots of good symbolic stuff to consider here). The confusion at the beginning puts us in an uncertain position, like the world, the socio-economic reality (this is Brooks' world, too) these 2, unnamed victim and unknown killer, inhabit, where nothing is as it seems; we are also put in the position of the "Surprised" victim, at the end, where, like him, "we know nothing."

"A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie!": This is an indictment of capitalist/materialist culture and a call for socialist redistribution--note the imagery dealing with the worker in a capitalist society, and the imagery that with great dark humor and sarcasm pretty much lay out how it all works, while Hollywood hacks imagine how it will all go (i.e., end) in an entertaining bang--Baraka might have a different kind of exolosion in mind (remember the final image of Hughes' "Harlem"), but what comes next (the "coming attraction," so to speak) is not nihilistic, but hopeful and soulful (see imagery of last stanza)

Giorno,"An Unemployed Machinist": The repetition can be suggestive in a # of ways.

Try not to take the incident too literally--the fear, etc., can have broader existential implications

View some of the performances, on Youtube, such as "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished"


As always, see study sheets/exercises on Bb for these poets..







More to come..