Hughes/Olson: Whose Music? Whose Era?
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[1] Stanford University
Stanford University
Estados Unidos
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- Localización: American literature: A journal of literary history, criticism and bibliography, ISSN 0002-9831, Vol. 87, Nº 2, 2015, págs. 303-330
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
This essay uses two poetic works from the 1950s—Langston Hughes’s 1951 sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred and the poetry and poetics of Black Mountain pioneer Charles Olson—to articulate a theory of racially engaged, nonmimetic poetic musicality deriving from the engagement both poets make with the bebop jazz of Charlie Parker and his colleagues. By taking “jazz” less as a specific body of sounds than as a conceptual provocation to rethink the very idea (and ideal) of poetry as a musical phenomenon, Hughes and Olson—both individually and together—help us make new sense of three phenomena: the way poetry relates to musical sounds external to it, the way poetry understands itself as a form of music, and the prospects for racial representation this reevaluation makes possible.
