NOW, WRITE THAT DOWN!
Between Slam and Love Jones, between MTV and Showtime at the Apollo, between campus poetry events and recording contracts, between the coffeehouse and the cameo spot on cable television, between more of that and all of that, there is still the question of actually writing poetry.
We are spouting more poetry than ever before. performing, orating, declaiming -- but where are the truly memorable poems -- the ones we can recite decades from now and those poems will still have meaning? What is lost in much of the current clamor of spoken word is an appreciation of and emphasis on art and ethos, on craft and meaning beyond what is topical and/or trendy.
The sad truth is that most poets today can't write -- couldn't "write" a concise and well crafted poem if there life depended on it. But, they can recite, act out, perform, wow an audience, get the peeps hyped, sho you right. Contemporary spoken word artists are like Vachel Lindsay -- who? -- precisely my point.
Back before the Garvey era poets (i.e. the commercially-named "Harlem Renaissance") there was Vachel Lindsay author of "The Congo." Lindsay also was someone who helped bring Langston Hughes to national attention. Lindsay was popular as all get out, his readings were major events.
In an authoritative two-volume study, "A History of Modern Poetry," critic David Perkins sums up Lindsay's appeal. "He sang, chanted, shouted, vibrated, accelerated, stopped, started again in a whisper; in short, he used widely varying volumes, pitches, and tempos, changing with dramatic suddenness. Meanwhile, he gestured, paced, cakewalked, mimed, and stamped out the rhythm of his accumulative catalogues. The audience was delighted... As he went about the country reciting these poems between 1915 and 1920, he attracted large audiences."
Today, few if any people read Lindsay's work. As for Langston Hughes -- well Hughes recited his work at the drop of a hat but, as his existing recordings painfully demonstrate, Hughes was no great shakes as a performer -- yet we still read Hughes long after Lindsay is forgotten. Why?
Because Hughes figured out how to succinctly write blues and jazz inspired poetry, to give those music-influenced words a second life through the longevity of the printed page. And it was no easy doing what Hughes did. You want a graduate course in poetry? Read two books: "The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes" (Knopf) and "Langston Hughes & the Blues" (University of Illinois Press) by Steven C. Tracy.
Hughes' collected poems is monumental, pay particular attention to the book length, multi-part "Montage of a Dream Deferred" poem whose various sections are famous as poems in and of themselves. You don't have to study it in depth to be instructed by Hughes' profound grasp of how to simply (but not simplistically) present the profound facts and acts of human existence.
Hughes took the rhythmic and melodic elements of blues and bebop and created written poetry that both reflected as well as transcended its origins. Would it not be wonderful if some young poet could do the same thing with hip-hop?
"Hughes & the Blues," on the other hand is a study, and as such is both insightful and inspirational. Tracy wisely limits his scrutiny to a specific set of poems, the "blues" verse, and then goes in depth. Even a rudimentary appreciation of the issues and concepts that Tracy fathoms would inspire fledging poets to important leaps in how one thinks of writing poetry and what the possibilities are for translating the art of the spoken word into the art of writing.
All of which brings me back to the concern of this short essay. Crafting poetry for the page is not a question of writing how you talk, but of using how you talk to help develop a style of writing that accurately and artfully both expresses how you are as well as articulates the relevance of your being to the rest of existence -- moreover, the "you" in this case is not just the individual "I" but really the collective "we" and the ethos we manifest.
We live in a disposable society, a society built on exploiting youth and novelty, but contemporary trends notwithstanding there is a big difference between momentary popularity and enduring relevance. If we are to be more than blips on the pulse beat of our time, if we are to produce a poetry the future will both listen to (and possibly even "sample") as well as read and treasure with both reverence and admiration, if we want to be poets then we must be more than performers.
I'll take Langston Hughes over Vachel Lindsay any day of the week, although I'm sure, back in the twenties if I had heard both of them read, I might have been wowed by Lindsay and underwhelmed by Hughes. Nevertheless, the proof of poetic greatness is not grounded in a momentary popularity but rather soars on the wings of a creative presentation of substance and imagination, body and soul.
The poet's most awesome task and, if we are both skillful and lucky, our most awesome accomplishment, is to create art that speaks across the ages; poetry which our people will recite in year 2100, just as we recite "Lift Every Voice and Sing" a hundred years after James Weldon Johnson first wrote the words in 1900.
Can you imagine writing a poem that has meaning a hundred years from now? If you can, than perhaps you have the heart of a poet, perhaps, you will be the one, to capture the ethos of our people and our era, maybe you will be the one to put that special message in the bottle to be enjoyed by future generations.
Poet, in the 21st century -- the beauty and importance of our oral culture notwithstanding -- your highest calling is to insightfully and expertly write us down.
—kalamu ya salaam