Part A: A SATRICAL APPROACH TO IMPROVISATION
In
Section I :
Langston Hughes used humor and laughter as devices to add to his writing a blues sensibility.
In Blues Poetry
, several authors’ uses of satire, affirming, ego-tripping, and a blues format and content will be examined.
Background:
The Inner City Mother Goose and The House that Crack Built
In her dedication of
The Inner City Mother Goose
, Eve Merriam writes, “
REMEMBERING
,
JESSE B. SEMPLE’S DADDY.
” What a fitting dedication from one blues artist to another! Eve Merriam in unleashing the pain of inner city New York used satire to improvise and move forward as she modernized the Mother Goose Nursery rhymes. Modernizing the nursery rhymes was a brilliant, but controversial idea. In fact, Tthe book was so controversial that it was barred from schools and public libraries.
Mother Goose rhymes date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although nursery rhymes have been inducted into our society as soft bedtime whispers, their original purpose was to pass news, gossip and warnings quickly and inconspicuously. Likewise, they came to be “methods of laughing at the powerful and passing the truth along” (Merriam,12).
Examinations of original versions illustrate that they may have been taken on as social and political commentary on the vice-ridden times. An example given in the book’s introduction reads:
In the case of “
Who Killed Cock Robin
?” (“I” said the sparrow, ‘With my bow and arrow’”) the gossip in government circles during the rule of Oliver Cromwell was that Robin was Sir Robert Walpole, secretary of the treasury (Merriam,6).
Merriam’s version
The Inner City Mother Goose
is written in satiric verses. Its language is easy to read and down-to-earth. It addresses traditional blues themes including: inadequate housing, unemployment, rats and rodents, crime, violence, public transportation, cutbacks in funding, and community issues. In doing so, Merriam is able to give a voice to “those who were being silenced” as it protests living conditions with “healing words” (Merriam,3).
Similar to poems in
The Inner City Mother Goose
is
The House that Crack Built
written by Clark Taylor and illustrated by Jan Thompson Dicks. It is a poem created by transforming the well-known nursery rhyme, “The House that Jack Built,” into a commentary on a societal problem. Its language is straight-forward and direct. It has a rhythm as do most blues poems; its rhythm is created by using a rap music beat and rhyme. The content of the poem reveals the dynamics of the drug problem in the United States. The harvest king pens, the planters, the soldiers who guard the king pens and monitor the planters, the street peddling drug dealers, the drug addicts and the crack addicted babies—all are traced in this poem. The poem further keeps in the blues tradition as it does not suggest that our society is helplessly beaten by the drug problem. Instead, it offers readers a choice. This is evident when looking at the girl who’s killing her brain, her head setting symbolically upside down atop her shoulders. Likewise, the reader realizes the choice when reading the last two lines of the poem, “And these are the Tears we cry in our sleep that fall for the Baby with nothing to eat.” The makers of the book stress this choice in the Afterword as it is stated, “The author used his poetic voice to remind us that the problem is out there. The illustrator used her artistic vision to bring the tragic nature of the problem powerfully alive. And the publisher chose to blend these visions into a book and to use its profits from that book to help fight the problem.” Hence, it can be concluded that the problem of drugs is tragically blue in this book, but its creation is a different hue of blue, a survivalist blue, an improvisationalist blue.