LANGSTON HUGHES TRIBUTE ISSUE
Introduction
by Katy Richey
This issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly honors
one of the most well known American poets of the twentieth century,
Langston Hughes. The issue falls on the 109th anniversary of Hughes’
birth (February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri) and commemorates his
impact on poetry as well as his time spent in Washington DC from November
1924 to February 1926.
The poems selected for this issue celebrate Hughes’s legacy
through poems about his life, poems written in his style, or on themes
Hughes dealt with his work. Like Hughes, these poets have either lived
or worked in the Washington DC area, in Maryland, Virginia or in the
surrounding states of West Virginia or Delaware.
The issue is organized into five sections, each titled after a book
written by Hughes. The first section, The Dream Keeper, taken
from his fifth collection, contains poems in reflection of Hughes
and in response to Hughes’s work. In her poem “Fine
Clothes To the Jew,” Davi Walders examines
different cultures’ influence on one another and suggests something
overlooked in Hughes perspective on the Jewish experience. This poem
is named for Hughes’s second published book of poems, which
he worked on while living in DC. E. Ethelbert Miller
also gives a stirring picture the poet as he describes a young Hughes
tossing books into the ocean in “Langston.” A “Dream
Deferred” poem is a must for any celebration of Langston Hughes,
and Gowri Koneswaran obliges with “Reverie
Revealed,” giving a possible answer to Hughes’s question
as well. What happens to a dream? “Maybe it writes the blues.”
The second section, The Weary Blues, named after Hughes’s
first published collection of poems, published while Hughes was a
DC resident, celebrates music and the influence the Blues in particular
had on Hughes’s work. Sarah Browning brings
us the signature DC sound in her poem “Doo Wop Hip Hop Go Go
Clang" which is appropriately followed by “Careless Love”
by Thomas Sayers Ellis, the king chronicler of Go-Go.
Hughes would probably relish a metaphor-off with Kyle Dargan
about what a song can really do, and discuss long into the night Brian
Gilmore’s “sugar mamma who gave…the key
to the highway.” The section is concluded by Randall
Horton’s “Blues Birthed into Go-Go” in
which a boy playing buckets outside a Green Line station hints at
true Hughesian architecture of spontaneous, precious music in the
city.
Hughes is well known for his writings about oppression of Africans
and African-Americans. In the third section, Shakespeare in Harlem,
named for a later book of Hughes’s poems, the poets give us
their raw interpretations of the realities of racial injustice and
inequity. Their words hold power in their specificity. Whether it
is the missing dogs in Bonnie Auslander’s “The
New Dog Map of the World” or the “blue… birthplace
of blackness” in Holly Bass’s “Indigo,”
their insights won’t allow us to “slip under the limbo
stick of race” as Reuben Jackson writes in
his poem “Green.” In Kathleen S. Rogers’s
poem “Buying all the Little Boys of Color” where lawn
jockeys are collected for proper burial, we are compelled to take
in each syllable, each sentiment, each gutted image.
The final section, I Wonder as I Wander, named for Hughes’s
second autobiography, celebrates Hughes’s continuing legacy
with a series of reflective poems. Three poets, Hayes Davis,
Jack Greer, and Joseph Ross, ponder
the challenge of bringing poetry to teenagers in the classroom. Derrick
Weston Brown reminds poets to stay true to the writing, lest
they end up with “overweight pot-bellied pig” poems. The
issue ends with a reflection by Luis Albert Ambroggio
who suggestions that only one poetic voice will endure the passage
of time. He writes: “A tiny grain of sand in the eternal murmur
of the ocean. A single shout.”
The poets in this issue represent a variety of cultures, places of
birth and social backgrounds. They help us honor a poet who appreciated
the complexities of human nature. As Langston Hughes writes in his
poem “The Dream Keeper”:
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
heart melodies.
And we do.
Katy Richey's work has appeared in Rattle,
Gargoyle, Torch, and Full Moon on K Street: Poems
about Washington DC. She is a Callaloo fellow and a 2009 Bread
Loaf participant. She co-hosts Busboys and Poets Sunday Kind of Love
Poetry Series and teaches English in Montgomery County, MD.
Published
in Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 2011.
To
read more by this author:
Katy
Richey
Katy Richey:
Evolving City Issue
|