The City Poem
There exists no widely accepted definition of the urban poem, the very idea of which for some seems to be a contradiction in terms. Kristiaan Versluys writes “there was a time when urban poetry sounded like a contradiction in terms, and even today the belief lingers on that nature is poetic by definition while the city is frequently thought of as… fit only for prose.”6 One intention of this unit is to refute the idea that only the natural world can be poetic and that there exists a strict dichotomy between the city and the country. For the purposes of this unit, we will define the city poem as any poem whose subject includes urban life, cityscapes, landmarks, cultures, and histories. When Langston Hughes asked “What happens to a dream deferred,7” he titled the poem “Harlem.” Stripped of its title, there is no immediately evident connection between the text of the poem and the New York neighborhood. A thorough and critical reading of the poem demands that we place it in the context of Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s. While “Harlem” has sang out for years in classrooms as a defining poem of the Black experience in the mid-20th century, readers can at times lose sight of the fact that the poem is rooted in a specific time and place. The precise contexts of the poem that students shall read are intended to ground them within the broader conversation that surrounds life in the city. Place, and by extension, the city, are essential to the themes and questions of this unit, and will likewise be just as important for students reading and responding to these poems. Student interpretations to these poems might be rooted in a specific time and place, but given the broad and inclusive definition of the city poem provided, instructors have a wide berth of excellent poems to choose from, exposing a diverse set of perspectives on lives lived in the city.
Academic conversations surrounding the urban poem in the English language usually start in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the spread of Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution in Europe. As Versluys describes it, the urban poetry of the Romantics “brims over with either impassioned pleas to beautify the city or wrathful exhortations to raze it to the ground,” but by the 20th century “poetic efforts start from the awareness that the city is immovably there to stay and that, as a result, ways and means have to be devised to put seemingly intractable urban material to poetic uses.”8 From 1800 to 2016 the percentage of people living in an urban area grew from 6% to 80%.9 While poets perhaps now more than ever before have to contend with the realities of life in the city, and to interpret those realities through language, there are new opportunities to explore the meaning of life in the city, in a way that will resonate with more people than ever before. For the students who learn in New Haven Public Schools, this is their reality, making the themes and ideas that students will respond to in these poems increasingly vital. It is equally vital that their voices are included in this discourse, responding to poems from both the past and the present to shape their visions for the future.
While the English language city poem might have found its footing in the Industrial Revolution, the tradition dates back as far as the Roman poet Martial, whose Epigrams offer a unique glimpse into life in the ancient metropolis. In Epigram 1.86, Martial remarks that his neighbor Novius “may be reached by the hand from my windows,” yet he is not “privileged either to live with him, or even see him, or hear him; nor in the whole city is there any one at once so near and so far from me.”10 An important component of this unit is to have students read a broad range of texts, to find the commonalities of experience that can still unite peoples over tremendous swaths of both time and space. While some of Martial’s epigrams might cover subjects as unfamiliar to most modern readers today as Roman religious rites, most people who have lived in a city can empathize with never knowing or interacting with the people who might live right next to us. Martial dedicates many of his epigrams to specific named individuals, and each one offers a brief glimpse into the Roman world that makes one of the largest metropolises of antiquity feel like a place full of life rather than a ruin. We must note, however, as William Chapman Sharpe does, that the locales we see through poetry may not be “cities of brick and mortar” but the “cities of mind, cities of words, into which the metropolis has been transformed by the power of art.”11 Both the physical and cultural legacies of these cities persist; we cannot know the Rome depicted by Martial as it really was, but we can “begin to understand how these cities were perceived by the poets who lived in them.”12 Sharpe seems to go too far in his assessment, however, as these interpretations of significant stages in the life cycle of a city reflect and respond to broader historical and socio-economic trends. The criticism of William Blake and Williams Wordsworth were born from a London which was rapidly industrializing, and we cannot read their work without that critical context.
In the English language, poets as far back as the early modern period followed the pattern set by Martial in the Epigrams. Ben Jonson even published his own Epigrams which covered life in the London of the sixteenth-century. Blake and Wordsworth present among the first city poems in English that deal with the cities of the Industrial Revolution, defined by their particular historical contexts. For these two poets, along with others in their literary circles, the city represented what was lost, a sort of break from harmony and order that the natural world presented. The fires of industry, which would endanger future generations through the damages of climate change, likewise blackened the streets and sky of nineteenth-century London, marring the city’s connection with the natural world. Take the “Chimney Sweeper,” whom Blake describes as “a little black thing among the snow,13” a victim of a rapidly urbanizing city, and a symbol of its maladies. These men could still find beauty in the city, but it was often not in its inhabitants. Consider Wordsworth, who writes of London in the morning, “Earth has not any thing to show more fair,” yet there are no people seen or mentioned in the poem, where “the very houses seem asleep.”14 It is people, then, who have blackened the skies and streets of London, marring the beauty that might be found there.
Walt Whitman provides a useful foil to many of the criticisms provided by Blake and Wordsworth, celebrating the throbbing life found in Manhattan. In “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” Whitman urges his poetic alter-ego to “keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum; Give me faces and streets” where dwell “comrades and lovers by the thousand.”15 Whitman’s New York feels inhabited and alive, and his poetry speaks to a deep connection between the poet and his subject. Blake’s poem evokes pity, while Whitman finds meaning in the unnamed, and fairly undistinguished, throngs. Similar to the sentiments found in Wordsworth and Blake, Whitman’s poem speaks to a dichotomy between Nature (note the capitalization) and the city. Many of the poems found in Whitman’s other works, such as Leaves of Grass, express a deep and meaningful connection to nature. It is interesting then, that Whitman splits the two in half here, with no apparent harmony between the two choices, even though Whitman himself found such meaning and purpose in both the natural world and cities inhabited by people. Versluys encourages his readers to consider Whitman and Wordsworth as two divergent perspectives in pursuit of the same goal, where for Wordsworth “the metaphysical unity is to be found outside the city, for Whitman inside.”16 One perspective is of the “City Reviled” and the other of the “City Redeemed.” Students will consider these two perspectives in how poets responded and reacted to cities that were becoming increasingly larger, more industrialized, and more global.
As the nineteenth century closed, far more people lived in a city then at its opening. Populations grew alongside the political and economic power of the metropolis. The socio-economic and demographic changes occurred in tandem with poetic aesthetics. Versluys writes that “the pressure of these sociological circumstances precluded an escape from the City into images of the ideal town or purifying nature. The city was a fact not excoriate or to glorify, but to live with.17” As new poets offered their interpretations and visions of life in the city that were increasingly engrained in lived experiences, of life as it was, not just as a tragic example of the consequences of industrialization or as an idealized vision. At the same time, poets were continuing to explore beyond the limits of formal structure and lyric. In his poem “The Waste-Land,” Eliot declares London the “Unreal City,” a phrase he attributes to Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Seven Old Men.” In that poem, Baudelaire declares Paris a “teeming, swarming city, city full of dreams,/ Where specters in broad day accost the passer-by!” In particular, he focuses on an unsightly old man whose likeness seems to multiply and fill the city streets. One cannot help but think of Eliot’s titular wasteland, and its opening section, “The Burial of the Dead,” as Baudelaire describes the old man “hobbling along in the snow and the mud/ As if he were crushing the dead under his shoes.” Baudelaire’s poetry focuses on the lived experiences of the city, using vivid description to bring Paris to life, a place that seems to teem, yet is seen through this lens of unreality, where the dead, and not the living, roam the streets. Sharpe writes that the poetry of Baudelaire, “insists on the motley splendor of the entire city and all its inhabitants, no matter how bizarre, perverse, or degraded.”18 There is a sense of isolation and detachment in Baudelaire’s poem from the motley splendor, a sense of isolation from lived experience that seems so common in Modernist poetry. Consider this along with Eliot’s description of London in “The Waste Land”:
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Eliot illumines the reality of a post-war London, where approximately six percent of the adult male population had perished fighting in the First World War, and detachment found in this city, with their gaze now shunning the life that teems in London. Like Baudelaire, Eliot takes time to examine individual voices in that city, like “Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant/ Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants,” yet still feels lost in the brown fog of winter. Sharpe concludes that “Eliot’s metropolis reveals itself only as an insubstantial tissue of texts, perverse personae, and fragmentary relationships representing the ruin of Western civilization.19” The view of the city, seemingly obscured by the density and complexity of Eliot’s lyric, is one that acknowledges the ironic isolation and loneliness that one might experience in a city surrounded by people.
As much as the city might be a geographic and demographic unit, it is at its core a political entity. In addition to poems celebrating, lamenting, and living within the city, poetry takes an inherent political gaze upon urban life. Alongside urbanization and industrialization came more concerted city planning. After all, local governments had to respond to growing needs of urban life, with sewage and sanitation, transportation, and even aesthetics increasingly becoming the mandate of cities. New Haven reveals a long and interesting history of urban development, from its status to one of the first planned cities in colonial America to the blunders of urban renewal. Nate Mickelson argues that “poets enact progressive modes of city planning in three ways, by exposing underlying urban realities… proposing alternative arrangements of resources and power, and politicizing the need for action.20” A primary aim of this unit is to encourage students to examine their own lives in the city through poetry, and translating this self-awareness to social and political consciousness, that poetry can speak truth to power. Too often we think of urban planning as a top-down effort, where those in power enforce their particular vision of the city onto its residents. Mickelson refutes this idea, and sees the power of poetry to effect meaningful change, or at the very least to raise awareness of one’s individual power. He does this by exploring the importance and place of neighborhood in Chicago as read through Gwendolyn Brooks, and poets of the Black Arts Movements who settled in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where we see “poetic visions rooted in direct experiences of the city’s harshest conditions and myriad small acts of resistance.”21 Mickelson also brings Henri Lefebvre into the conversation, emphasizing the “right to the city which residents can only have when they possess the means to compose their own ‘social reality’ regardless of external constraints” something that is “existential as much as physical.” This concept of the “right to the city” expressed through poetry can be found on stunning display in Jamaal May’s “There are Birds Here,” a poem which explicitly pushes back against preconceptions of life in Detroit. May writes:
There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
This poem asks us to consider how language is used to defame a city, rooted in misunderstandings and misinterpretations. The unnamed “they” of the poem stands as the outsiders, those who look in on the city without have lived or experienced life there. May rejects the assumptions that others place on his city, and instead redefines the metaphor into a celebration. This celebration, while perhaps not eliciting specific political change, still speaks to the power that the residents of a community have in shaping the narratives and stories which define it. A strong example of the political poem can be found in Lewis Macadams’s “The River,” an extended project of poetry, community resistance, and political action, centered around efforts to restore some of the Los Angeles River’s natural splendor, cemented over as part of the plan of the city. In the poem, Macadams writes “we ask if we can/ speak on its behalf/ in the human realm./ We can't hear the river saying no/ so we get to work.” Written as part of and in conjunction with the Friends of the Los Angeles River, Mickelson writes that “Macadams’s poem enacts an insurgent mode of planning critical to producing a more just and equitable urban future.”
Mickelson’s ideas of the political city poem relate to the broader social scientific concepts surrounding city planning. Macadams’s poetry again highlights the seeming divides between nature and the city. Julie E. Daniel in Building Nature, present several unique and interesting ways to consider nature, urban environments, and city planning in poetry. Daniel uses the specific lens of the city park, something that is itself an imitation of nature. Of special interest here are her discussions of Carl Sandburg and his connection to Chicago. Daniel is especially interested in how we might see “a vision of Chicago where nature and culture meet in an urban garden on the edge of a shining lake promulgated and in part realized by Daniel Burnham the father of American city planning... Voices a persistent concern for the place of nature in this urban context.”22 These visions of the city are theoretically underpinned by the idea that the built environment has an impact on the way people actually live their lives. Consider how architecture influences social and political life, in addition to the ever-important concept of green space. Can we bridge the disconnection from nature that Wordsworth feared? Is there truly as sharp a distinction between city and nature as one might initially expect? This is a good intermingling with some of the activism that Mickelson brought up. “The spatial texts that so intrigued Sandberg, Stevens, Williams, and Moore persist. They shape us, we shape them. Our communities alter these architectures as needs arise, and our community uses change as spaces flood, freeze, infect, bloom, fall into neglect, and rise into new forms. What form should nature take in this place? These poets offer us the imaginative tools needed in our present moment as we build and rebuild our green worlds.23” Wallace Stevens presents an interesting counterpoint to some of these questions, in the ways in which he interprets public spaces. Daniel writes that “Stevens combines admiration [of public green spaces] with critique, all while foregrounding the artifice of these apparently natural spaces.”24 Consider the reference to the “metaphysical streets” that Stevens makes in his poem on New Haven, as he attempts to give meaning to the artifices of the city through the language, something itself which is not always concrete. The question of the relation of the city to nature persist throughout the poetry analyzed here across time, and its implications bear even more importance with the changes and destruction of climate and environment we see today.
Voicing the Poems of the City
The two most immediate sensory experiences one has in the city are sight and sound. Having analyzed the city poem as a literary form, and how that analysis must inform teaching of the city poem, these next two sections factor in how these urban sights and sounds are reflected in and by poetry. As a form, poetry emphasizes its sound and structure to our analysis. In making poetry more approachable and accessible to students, we must both consider the theoretical implications of the audible and material qualities of poetry and then apply that to our pedagogical practice. Indeed, these qualities will be the primary mode by which students will both analyze and create poetry in this unit.
One of the driving factors of this unit’s interpretation of sound is the idea of the poetic voice. Indeed, the idea of a poet’s voice is central to the unit’s essential themes and topic. The idea of voice is not just based on the literal interpretation of the sound of the poem, which includes for the purpose of this unit prosody and rhyme, and while this literal aspect must be included in students’ interpretation of poetry, we should consider the figurative meaning of voice. Leslie Wheeler perhaps puts it best in her book on the same topic: “Voice implies poetry’s reliance on sound; however, voice is also a metaphor for originality, personality, and the illusion of authorial presence within printed poetry. Voice in the political sense as the right or ability to speak or write also intersects with literary studies. It encapsulates these poetic conflicts but also suggests the common interest underlying them.”25 In the course of the unit, it is essential that students explore and interrogate all three of Wheeler’s proposed definitions of poetic voice: the auditory, the metaphor of author’s presence, and the political. The selection of poems proposed in the teaching of this unit are intended to cover all three of these definitions; however, it must be noted that these three definitions are not distinct from each other, in that almost every poem can be said to possess a voice that is at the same time audible, authorial, and political. For the purposes of teaching the unit however, we must start with the verbal component, and then further elaborate upon the multifaceted meanings of poetic voice from there. A useful question, as posed by Wheeler, reads “can a poem regarded only in its textual incarnation possess a voice?26” While it will ultimately be up to the students to answer this question, the aim and purpose of this unit inherently points to an emphatic ‘yes,’ an answer supported by Wheeler’s own scholarship. Indeed, with perhaps very few exceptions of poetry that appears unpronounceable on the page, there is always utility in hearing a poem read aloud, to hear the voice made alive. This vivification is made possible through the poet’s style, structure, word choice, prosody, rhyme, rhythm, and use of figurative language. Most readers “hear” the text in their head when reading, and the act of hearing a poem only solidifies the complex interplay of sound already at work in the poem. It is impossible, then, to consider any poem in only its textual incarnation. Sound will always play a factor in how we read, write, and share poetry. Authorial presence and style begets the verbalized voice of the poet. As historian of political thought J.G.A. Pocock argues, “verbalization itself [is] a political act.”27 Even for content that is on the surface apolitical, especially given the climate around reading today (not discounting the at times even more fraught climates from the past, from the banning of books in libraries to restrictions on curricula, the very act of not just writing poetry, but speaking it aloud, is an expression of political voice). Given the subject and themes of many city poems are themselves explicitly political, and often concern citizens asserting their “right to the city,” this element of poetic voice is especially important to the aims of this unit. Using the theoretical premise that poetic voice is at once political, verbal, and stylistic, that students will understand how, as Sharpe offered, artists transform the physical city, sights and sounds included, into the poetic.
The concept of voice will be the primary lens through which students analyze the “sound” of poetry in this unit. Rhyme, rhythm, and prosody all construct the voice of a poem, and students will interpret these specific parts of the poem in the unit. For many students, rhyme is one of the most identifiable features of a poem, and indeed, in my classroom, students have often defined poetry as “a story that rhymes.” What better way to introduce students to the deeper purposes of sound in poetry than to start with rhyme? For example, In Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” we see Wordsworth rhyme in the first and fifth lines to elaborate his vision of an ideal city: “Earth has not any thing to show more fair/ The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.” Through the use of rhyme, Wordsworth emphasizes that the city is at its most beautiful when its streets are emptiest. Rhyme works not only to make a poem sound lyrical, but in fact serves specific purposes which illuminate a poem’s themes and messages. Walt Whitman, a master of lyrical free verse, serves as an exemplar of how repetition, and careful choice of words, can make a poem feel lively and real: “Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan!/Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give/ me the sound of the trumpets and drums!” The repetition of “give” at the start of each line further stresses the poet’s deep love and admiration for urban life. Through the use of auditory imagery, Whitman places his reader directly in Manhattan, enabling the reader to both visualize and sonify the city that he is celebrating. Readers can imagine the clamor that Whitman might have heard on those streets, with the jubilant sound of trumpets and drums echoing across the city’s buildings. The poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes both employ sound to accurately reflect urban life and culture. Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” with its unique enjambment where the concluding word of each line begins the sentence of the next, has a sing-song quality that echoes popular music of the time:
We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
With rhymes hidden internally and a consistent length for each phrase, Brooks’ poem feels both musical and dialogical. In her own performance of the poem, one can hear the lyrical whimsy which supports the flippant wantonness of youth in the city and belies the darker conclusion to the poem. Langston Hughes, in his collection of poems Montage of a Dream Deferred, directly speaks to life in Harlem as it was. The very first poem in the collection “Dream Boogie” directly reflects the culture of Harlem in the 1940s: “Good morning, daddy!/ Ain't you heard/The boogie-woogie rumble/Of a dream deferred?” Hughes’s poetry reflects the way people spoke, and at the same time places the poem in its specific context. The reader is immediately made aware that Hughes has placed a primary emphasis on the life and sound of Harlem in this collection. The concluding lines of the poem “Hey, pop!/ Re-bop!/ Mop!/ Y-e-a-h!” reflect the scat singing prominent in the bebop style of jazz prominent in the 1940s. For Hughes, sound is an essential component to both this poem and Harlem itself. In this poem, the voice of Harlem that Hughes crafts is the voice of jazz. While more concrete teaching strategies will be discussed in the section below, these examples show how sound, and the accompanying literary devices that poets employ, is essential to the close reading of poetry.
The reading of poetry aloud is a mainstay of English Language Arts Classrooms, and increasingly public reading and staging of a poet’s work has been essential to literary success. In this unit, students will be asked to “perform” a poem, a term here which goes beyond recitation. It must be acknowledged that even a poem recited reveals problems between the written and spoken forms. Jan Baetens warns, however, that “in many cases a poem is depreciated by forcing it from the page onto the stage.”28 Baetens’ analysis is focused primarily on the public performance of poetry, in most cases done by the poets themselves, and does distinguish between performance and repletion. His ideas give depth to our understandings of the role of sound in the interpretation of a poem. Baetens does not argue that we should ignore sound in poetry, but that there are stark difficulties in performing a poem stemming from the “crumbling of the old poetic model [i.e. metered verse] which guaranteed an easy transition of the text to the oral” and that “new conceptions of poetry do not always facilitate the movement between page and voice.”29 While the depreciation that Baetens warns of does not seem an evident problem, given the importance of sound in poetry, he does bring up important considerations with the meaning-making, or perhaps meaning-muddling, of poetic performance. In essence, the essential question that Baetens asks is “how does the ‘voice’ read the text?”30 Consider diction, speed, elocution, and tone that all go into the delivery of a poem, and to further complicate things, the addition of visual elements to a performance. Given that a poem presents multiple meanings, does a reading of a poem then subscribe to one particular interpretation? Baetens’ concerns are based on the confusion of meaning that the reading of poetry might create, yet for our students, both as readers and writers of poetry, the goal is to elucidate the meanings that speak to us. Public reading, then, can reveal meanings that might differ from the form seen on the page, as well as provide new lenses of interpretation.
The City as Poetic Object
The city poem transforms the physical world into the poetic. Both Wordsworth and Eliot set base poetic interpretations of London on Westminster Bridge. Lazarus’s the “New Colossus” spells out the meaning of the Statue of the Liberty, where “from her beacon-hand/ Glows world-wide welcome.” Indeed, Lazarus’s poem is now permanently affixed to the statue’s pedestal, her interpretation, as expressed through poetry, shapes the meaning that so many people see in the Statue of Liberty today. Lazarus has given figurative meaning to the material object. In “To Brooklyn Bridge,” Hart Crane deifies the titular bride, that as “sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, / unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.” Here, Crane emphasizes the scenic beauty of the Brooklyn Bridge as mythological in stature, an essential aspect to the spiritual life of New York. While people and culture are arguably what defines a city, one cannot discount that physical spaces, buildings, parks, streets, are essential to the defining character of a city. The foundation of the field of urban planning is that the way that space is laid out has a demonstrable effect on the lives lived in that city. This “translation” of urban materiality into poetry is the primary concept of poetry as object that students will be asked to interrogate. We will also use tools that consider poetry as a literal object, from shape poetry, text structures and forms, to poetry as interpreted through visual arts, including both video poetry and illustrated poetry. Just like with our use of sound, these tools will be used both to expand the meanings already found in the textual form as well as providing new interpretations.
The internet age has considerably expanded access to poetry for readers of all ages. The growth of digital reading is certainly a boon, yet at times there is something significant lost in a poem’s meaning when it is removed from its original medium. Visual art in particular can be essential to our readings and understanding of poetry, especially when the poem originally included a painted or illustrated element. William Blake made paintings to accompany many of his poems, and the painting for London highlights the “marks of weakness, marks of woe” he sees in the faces of the city’s inhabitants (Figure 1). An older man and a child appear in the painting above the text, the old man is hunched over with a gait that speaks of aches and pain, while the child reaches his hand out. Perhaps they recognize in each other’s faces the weakness and woe that Blake describes. Further below, a fire roars, the smoke blackening the page and creeping into the poem’s lettering, emphasizing “how the Chimney-sweepers cry/ every blackning Church appalls.” The painting gives further context to the meaning and purpose behind the poem’s text, and allows students to cross-apply analytical tools for both poetry and visual art.
Figure 1 – William Blake, “London” – Public Domain31
Langston Hughes’s “Come to the Waldorf-Astoria” is best understood and interpreted in its original context. Appearing in the Marxist magazine The New Masses, the poem directly mimics similar advertisements that appeared in Vanity Fair (Figure 2). The poem highlights the excesses of capitalism in the midst of the Great Depression, as Hughes’s version of the advertisement declares to “all you families put out in the street: Apartments in the Tower are only 10,000 a year.” The text satirizes the original advertisement, while the accompanying illustration further highlights the exclusive garishness offered by the hotel. Large-bodied doormen stand vigilant guard outside while guests revel and rage inside. Below the image along the edges of the page, seemingly crushed by the weight of the greed depicted and described in the image and text above, are images of working-class people, with looks of despair and concern on their faces, caring for their families. As Wheeler writes, “it is far richer in its original context-carefully laid-out and provocatively illustrated- than in the stripped down versions offered by its later reprintings.”32 Without both the illustration and the intentional mimicking of the original Vanity Fair advertisement, the poem’s stinging punch is lost. This poem also demonstrates how “Hughes sought ways to deliver voice and music into visual medium of print.”33 The interconnectedness of poetry’s material and auditory qualities are both emphasized here, with Hughes’s casual and faux-corporate tone working together with the illustration to criticize greed and excess.
Figure 2 – Langston Hughes, “Come to the Waldorf Astoria” – Public Domain34
Students will consider both traditional visual art along with video interpretations of poetry. While the images accompanying Blake’s Hughes’s poems were an intentional part of the original creative process, video interpretations of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” and Jamaal May’s “There are Birds Here” serve to show how others can translate poems from the page to the screen. In the film version of “We Real Cool,” Brooks’s recitation of the poem is accompanied by scenes from Chicago created through paper-cut puppetry and accompanied with jazz, further immersing students in the life of the city as described in the poem. The video concludes with a musical rendition of the poem, emphasizing the “Jazz June” described in the poem. The video accompanying “There are Birds Here” takes a more abstract approach to the poem, thus allowing students to analyze two different approaches to adapting a poem to a video format. The intention of using video adaptations is to allow students to not only exercise critical thinking skills by comparing the poem on the page with that on the screen, but to also enhance their understanding of the original poem.
We have already analyzed how Langston Hughes made Harlem come alive through sound, and Hughes gives as much attention to the sounds of the city as he does to the sights. The poem “Neon Signs” gives life to the clubs and stages where Jazz musicians honed their craft. The shape of the poem itself resembles a dangling neon sign, and the name of different clubs appear in bold capitals, from the “WONDERBAR” to “MINTON’S (ancient altar of Thelonious.)” Here, visual interpretation plays an equally important role. Jacob Lawrence prepared several illustrations for the Montage, both emphasizing the centrality of Harlem as well as highlighting the Black experience in New York in the immediate post-war years. One illustration directly reflects the text of “Neon Signs” (see the link to the image found in the resources section). Lawrence’s illustration gives a sense of melancholy, seen in other poems such as “Harlem,” and “Dream Boogie,” with a solitary figure atop what appears to be a hearse amidst the neon signs. This poem emphasizes that the artistic and poetic process is often collaborative, as the meanings of image and text combine. Through visual art, the use of shape poetry, and Hughes’s return to the auditory imagery of bop in the poem, concluding with “Mirror-go-round… smears re-bop sound35” that we see a stunning conjunction of the sight and sound of poetry combine to give true voice to the city. The structures that Hughes, and other poets, employ gives space to new significant meanings in analyzing the poem.