Salvation By Langston Hughes

Softly Asking Over and Over Its Old Question

Before we begin, let us remark, tho,' about how much  AYM  means to professional readers of Langston Hughes.  Those professors label the poem w/ heavy terms -- classic, epic, masterpiece.  They use it as a basis to compare Hughes to T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane.  We have big love for those brothers, but we think the Book of Langston is (obviously) composed on its own terms, a vocabulary distinctive because the author's interesting approach to both audience and multiple media.  We note this now, even as we have made this point before , because we believe this is one of the big points in the Book of Langston, and that many readers just plain miss it because they are reading for the wrong thing.  The poet laureate of Harlem, just like the King of the Zulus, just means more than most of us currently realize.   And so we start our what we have to say about  AYM  by remarking that it is conceived as a language experienced both visually (on colorful, carefully crafted pages -- not the first time Langston played for book as object) and as a musical performance* (and as we have been noting , this is an effort in his career that he returns to from beginning to end).  In fact, there if we think AYM  as an LP (thought for a later post), complete w/ tracklist and liner notes, we have a third and highly timebound and mediated take on both of the first two approaches -- Langston knew how to play w/ the dialectic, dig? We always take AYM as all of these experiences and make the most of them to understand it. We've been unable to establish a reference version of this tune.  In fact the opposite, it's one of those jes' grew tunes that the tin pan alley gangstas (people like Smythe, Middleton and Gillham or Handy who made it, or not, stackin' bundles in the early 20th c. song dealing game) tried to line up property rights to their bankaccounts.  From the beginning of rekkids, there's "Hesitation" and "Hesitating."  The versions were kicking around dancehalls, vaudeville, the fields and anywhere else cratediggers went looking for their fresh back in the day.  The different versions develop different takes on the impatience, but both come around to the question, "Can I get you now, or must I hesitate?

English for a Better World Iv' 2007 Ed.

Not So Simple, The "Simple" Stories by Langston Hughes

The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Gospel plays, operas, and later dramatic works

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Roles for writers and readers, a rhetorical anthology