Perhaps a lot of us first encountered the poems of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes in a classroom where he numbered among the few writers of color we were assigned to study.
Danez Smith, the National Book Award-nominated poet, experienced this lack of exposure to diverse writers first-hand, too. He writes in the introduction of Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes—a collection he curated—about being in the seventh or eighth grade English class and being “bored.”
For Smith, the lack of motivation had come from being assigned “dead poet after dead poet” and having to “approach poetry as a series of right or wrong interpretations, an act of decoding, maneuvering through English that often felt completely alien from what we spoke.” He said that it was not necessarily a “curriculum designed for us to fall in love with poetry.”
But he did fall in love—eventually. In that earlier classroom experience, he recalls having read “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes. Hughes, he said, “was the only Black poet we studied” and the experience put Smith in the mind of church and Sunday sermons. “That a short, quiet poem, one buried deep in a textbook and placed before me as an uninterested twelve- or thirteen-year-old could send my mind to the music and rapture was new for me,” writes Smith.
Beyond this point in his education, Smith continues to encounter the work of Hughes. He is constantly moved by all of the things he noted Hughes did with his poetry, even as a very young teenager.
In Blues in Stereo, we see Hughes’ work that spans this early writing from 1921 to 1927—before Hughes was 25 years old. Many earlier drafts of these poems were first penned when Hughes was just a teenager.
In this volume, Smith divides Hughes' work into seven disparate sections.
Part 1, says Smith, “offers early works with Hughes so clearly illustrating “that the work of liberation starts always as an act of care, of loving and seeing someone in the full expression of their being.”
We see that music, nightlife, jazz and performance are the subjects of the second part of the work.
The third part focuses on travel and the ways Hughes broadened the perspectives in his poetry as his own world view widened. He had traveled to Mexico and South America at the young age of 18. The work in this book is informed by this journeying. He had sailed through the Caribbean and even visited Africa.
Politics and labor are the subject of Part 4. In Part 5 we see Hughes playing with personas and points of view—this in an effort of building distance from his own story and the stories on the page.
Part 6 includes a play that Hughes co-wrote with Duke Ellington. It includes a full score and glorious experimentation with rhythm and structure.
The final part that rounds out the work includes the poem, “Formula” —a work Smith says should be taken with a “good dose of irony,” thereby insisting we not be passive in our reading, but that we engage with it and see how “poems can help us change the world” when “we have an active hand in the matter.”
The archival material Danez Smith encountered and that the publication keeps in its original form, offers us a look at the thought process of Langston Hughes and his literary genius. We come to appreciate his obsessions, the delight he found in so many quotidian subjects that he celebrated, his insights and frustrations on wrongs that needed to be set right—perhaps still need to be set right.
Reading the book is like being able to trace in some kind of real time the development of this master poet who went on to influence numberless writers of all genres and art forms.
Danez Smith, another of our great poets living in America today, is a perfect guide for us through this necessary and luminous collection of Langston Hughes’ earliest work.
Blues in Stereo portrays a young man coming of age in a changing world. Langston Hughes went on to author and edit more than thirty works of poetry, novels, plays, essays, and children’s books.
Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He was an innovative artist known, too, for his vociferous condemnation of racism and injustice.
Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes is a collection that reveals to us the potential and promise of the great poet that many of us first came to know—if fleetingly—in classrooms in our own youth. But it stands as a collection as important as any other in the oeuvre of the great Langston Hughes, whose work many of us have held dear for decades since that earliest glimmering introduction.
