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by David Woo, The Emancipator
For over a century, the work of Langston Hughes has offered a poetic vision arising from his courageous engagement with Black experience and culture. His work spoke in the popular rhythms of the blues and jazz and the unadorned yet lilting everyday vernacular.
Charming, handsome, yet sexually elusive, Hughes helped to make the Harlem Renaissance a source for new expressions in American culture, starting in 1921 with the publication of a signature poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in “The Crisis,” a journal edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. Impoverished and struck by artistic wanderlust, Hughes abandoned his studies at Columbia University to join the crew of a freighter bound for Africa, with a desire to uncover his origins.
Decades later, in “Blues in Stereo,” poet and author Danez Smith examines the exciting formative period of Hughes’ career as a poet in the early 1920s. They gathered “uncollected poems, songs, drafts from abandoned projects, and works published in groundbreaking radical Black publications in the 1920s and ’30s that are now out of print,” such as “The Crisis.” Smith has also curated literary materials from New York University’s Schomburg Center and Yale’s Beinecke Library, including the draft of an unfinished musical piece in collaboration with Duke Ellington.
Smith’s curation offers a grand tour of the period in Hughes’ young life during which he found his poetic voice and became the Hughes that we think of today. In an exchange with David Woo for The Emancipator, Danez Smith discussed the importance of Hughes and curating his work in “Blues in Stereo.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
David Woo: How did this project come about, and why has Langston Hughes been central to your own work?
Danez Smith: This project came into my life at the invitation of the folks at Legacy Lit. They had just done “Sing a Black Girl’s Song: The Unpublished Work of Ntozake Shange” with the visionary Imani Perry and wanted to keep diving into the archives of our Black legends. When they called me and asked if I would serve as curator for a new Hughes project, I was elated. [My editor] Amina Iro had already started doing the research, so it was just my role to dream into the work they’d done and try to lift young Langston.
I think that there is no way for Hughes not to be central in my work and education. For me, Hughes is one of those root poets, like Dickinson, like Whitman, to whom all American poetic roads lead back. For Black poets, I imagine all roads lead to Wheatley, to Hughes, to Brooks, to Scott-Heron, to Giovanni. Of course, Hughes’ shadow looms large for a Black, queer poet [me] born just 88 years after him. I am grateful to live on this side of all the doors he and his contemporaries opened and created from thin air.
But literally, there is no Danez Smith if Langston Hughes wasn’t Langston Hughes. Also, I am attracted to Hughes for his love of jazz. Seeing him find and become jazz through his work helps me wander more into the hip-hop and funk influences of my work.
Your poetry books display a complex pride, urgency, and despair in your experience of race. In “Bluff,” you say, “i want to be over with race / but race ain’t over me.” And in your first book, “[insert] boy,” you wrote, “If race is over, did we lose?” What is striking about “Blues in Stereo” is how healing Hughes’ love of Black people feels to those of us who feel despair over 21st-century oppressions. Can you talk about Hughes’ vision of race and how it relates to your experience today?
For me, Hughes’ vision of race, country, and community is not one without despair, but despair never swallows what is joyful and possible, and in turn that joy and beauty never erase what is ugly and true.
I wanted to center “Blues in Stereo” on how much Hughes loved Black people. When I read his work, I feel him wanting me to feel beautiful, strong, redeemed, believed, and safe — safe enough to admit I’m weary and worried, too. I feel that same tie in my own work. What is raging, pissed, despairing, exhausted, grieving, or vengeful all leads back to love, how to love the race; the people. When Black adults want to teach Black kids how and why to love themselves, they will reach for art, and when they reach for poems, it is very possible you might get a Hughes poem when you are being taught to see and love Blackness. I think of what the great Evie Shockley (who I hope is being read by Black kids learning to love themselves 100 years from now) said in her “ode to my blackness:”
you are my shelter from the storm
and the storm
my anchor
and the troubled sea
And I think that balance is something all Black poets who write about Blackness contend with; how to tell of the anchor, how to tell also of the troubled sea, how to survive the storm and be the storm. Hughes knew how to do it all. I know Hughes believed in revolution and, as healing and beautiful as he wanted his poems to be for us, he also wanted to arm us with the wisdom, hope, and power to fight for a liberation yet to arrive.
His biographer thought him largely asexual, though there is some evidence of homosexual and heterosexual affairs. What are your thoughts about Hughes’ queerness? And how does it inform your understanding of the man and his poetry?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, also folks have started to ask, and I think I have settled on that, while I feel in my gossipy and true little gay heart that the man is some kind of queer, the want of evidence, confirmation, or affirmation of that to be true is largely my own selfish want for something more to recognize of myself in him. If he was queer, I hope he had a fantastic time being it and had the spaces and people to feel some version of free. I hope he had enough love to be greedy about it.
In your introduction, you write about how your first encounter with Hughes “made me think of church, about my pastor’s sermons and all the songs we’d sing about knowing. …” Can you speak about spirituality in Hughes’ work and how it relates to your own?
Fun fact: I have a now very, very blurry tattoo of Hughes’ “Feet o’ Jesus” on my left forearm.
I think Hughes and I both come from people who believe in God, and we both believe in him because, well, our people do. I think, like many writers, particularly ones who might be queer and might question the merits and future of capitalism and who start to pull apart power, you pull apart God. But at the same time, you want power, you want to share power or you want to take power, or you want to make a new power. You want God, or you make a new God.
I’m afraid I’ve started to sound like a poem.
I mean, God was huge in Hughes’ work because when you hold Black people and power and America and music at the center of your curiosity, of course, God is there too. And there are times when you praise him and times when you find yourself raging at the sky.
How did you find out about Langston Hughes’ unfinished collaboration with Duke Ellington, “Cocko’ the World”? What do you imagine their final piece would’ve felt like, sounded like?
Shout out to the researchers! The first materials I received were from Hughes’ archives at Yale and the Schomburg Center. “Cocko’ the World” was a part of them, and my jaw dropped when I realized we almost had the jazz musical of the century. Someone needs to make it happen. I imagine it would feel like Broadway took some acid and ended up in Mississippi with some Jamaicans — very funky, jazzy, global, Black, diasporic. What moves me is the global scale of its vision, for it’s sort of about Hughes’ own coming into a knowledge of the big, Black world and the anti-Black world built around it. Oh, I know whoever heard the bits of it was blessed something fierce.
This article first appeared on The Emancipator and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
