Blues and Jazz and Hughes

I listened to Ma Rainey's "Black Bottom," Louis Armstrong and Ma Rainey's "Countin' the Blues," and Jelly Roll Morton's "Honky Tonk Blues." I listened to the songs, then I read the poems by Hughes before listening to the songs again briefly. Hughes' poetry definitely exhibits blues-like rhythm as well as jazz in some poems. The poems are highly repetitive, which is characteristic of the songs at the time. Also, many of the poems are written in common terms and are not crisp sounding at the ends of lines, but rather give the reader a feeling of rhythm that is similar to that in the blues songs. The lines flow onto each other nicely, as do the lines in blues and jazz. The lines seem simple, yet when you imagine them sung in the blues style, they seem powerful and emotional, which is exactly what the blues and jazz music was capable of expressing, raw emotion and lament. As we talked about in class, blues and jazz involved a lot of improvisation, and this lines up with poems such as "Lament over Love." In this particular poem, it seems as if the speaker is talking to himself, deciding what he will do and his opinion over whether love is like wine or whiskey, as he writes. It gives the reader the feeling that the poem itself is improvisation. Other poems speak directly about the musical phenomena of the time, mentioning the musical style in "Trumpet Player." Hughes' style is very much in alignment with the blues and jazz rhythms, themes, and sound of improvisation, making it clear that he was inspired and influenced by the cultural music of his time.

Discussion Questions

1. What do the descriptions given in Toomer's "Portrait in Georgia" paint a portrait of? Why do you think he chose the imagery that he did- does it allude to anything of cultural importance or is it simply painting a picture of a person?

2. In Tolson's "Lambda," how does the use of historical references and biblical allusions affect the meaning and significance of the poem?

Writing Style- Blog 1

Writing is a form of art and it can be done in a large variety of styles. One such style is a very informal form of writing, writing in the vernacular or common language of a group or culture. This is seen very often in poems such as "Slim Greer." Using simple, common terms to tell a story in a poem is easy to read and to understand- it often expresses raw emotion better than lofty sounding poems because formal works seem more scripted in a way. Brown writes his poems, especially his Slim Greer series, in informal language. It seems as if his primary audience would be African Americans who feel torn between being "white" and maintaining their culture. They long to do normal things and to be themselves fully, such as having the ability to laugh aloud, but they are prohibited. Brown puts this law into an almost humorous anecdote and relays it through his poem "Slim in Atlanta." Since blacks were not allowed to laugh out loud, it is somewhat ironic that he wrote about not being able to laugh in a humorous way. Informal writing's advantage is that you can relate to your culture in a real way- laying it all on the table without "sugar-coating" anything. The focus can be on content rather than in formality. However, the disadvantage is that in the past, it especially limited who would be willing to take the writing seriously or consider it worthy of being read. White people would dismiss the bad grammar as lacking intelligence, rather than lacking education that was withheld from the black people. The advantage of formal writing is that it would be read by whites and would be in a language that caught their eye, one that would be considered intelligent. They would be shocked as to how well it was written, so they would read on and inevitably absorb the content as well. This can be seen in the poem "Sympathy," by Dunbar. He uses beautiful, sophisticated figurative language to express the African American's pleas for freedom and hope for freedom. This could be seen as a cry for sympathy from the whites who read it. The language would make them read on, and hopefully the message would be understood. By sounding very formal, it would appeal to the whites as a worthy cause to help because it shows blacks have untapped potential and intelligence. The disadvantages to formal writing are that they mask the emotions and cries of the blacks for freedom- it puts their struggle in beautiful sounding words, which seems to contradict the idea of struggle and suffering itself.