100 years ago: Young Langston Hughes publishes his first poem in 1921
Excerpt from his first published poem
““The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921): Written when he was 17 years old on a train to Mexico City to see his father, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was Hughes’ first poem which received critical acclaim after it was published in the June 1921 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis.” -From biography.com:
Normally a copy of Langston Hughes’s Shakespeare in Harlem like this wouldn’t be the type of book we acquire. It’s the third printing, its dust jacket is long gone, and the cover well-worn.
But it’s also an excellent example why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover! This appears to be Hughes’s own copy of the last edition of this book issued during his lifetime. Not only that, Hughes made changes to fifteen of its poems, some of them dramatic shifts in the tone, rhythm, length, or meaning of the text.
This copy turned up in a sorority house at Lincoln University (Hughes’s alma mater) a couple of years ago, from which it was sold at auction and entered the rare book trade. Much about the volume remains to be discovered. The changes that Hughes made in this volume have not been published or incorporated into any of the later editions of Hughes’s collected works or poems.
Josephine Baker was a singer, dancer, spy, activist, paragon of beauty, and member of social circles that included luminaries like Langston Hughes, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway. Not bad, eh? She wowed audiences in her adopted France, worked for the resistance in the WWII, and returned back to the States to integrate concert halls and fight in the civil rights movement. If you think she sounds like a busy lady, wait until you hear about her 12 kids! This Push Girl was simply amazing.
Tell your friend she’s got a little Josephine Baker in her. Reblog now to give her a little push.
New Arrivals: Black Graphics International: A Journal of Revolutionary Literature & Art - No.20 (Fall-Winter, 1975), edited by Aaron Pori Pitts.
A later issue of this Detroit-based Black Arts journal, founded in 1969 by artist and poet Aaron Pori Pitts. This issue features an editorial on “Fascism in the Media,” essays, news, and artwork by regulars in the Detroit arts and literary scene. Laid into this issue are three BGI advertising flyers, subscription form, three-year calender on cardstock (1975-1977), and an additional flyer for the opening of Ed Bullins’s The Fabulous Miss Marie at The Langston Hughes Theatre (Feb.26, 1976).
Amiri Baraka eMaya Angelou; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1991.
Foto:Chester Higgins, Jr.
«As I watched, Amiri Baraka asked Maya Angelou to dance and walked her to the “I’ve Known Rivers” Cosmogram — the focal point of the celebration, newly set into the floor over the ashes of Langston Hughes. As the two poets danced, the energy of the crowd focused on them. The room came alive as everyone applauded. In this impromptu tribute to Langston Hughes,I believe these two African-American icons created a moment that reflected our collective love for poets of African descent and the continuity of African creative genius.»(A Dance of Rivers, Chester Higgins, Jr.)
[image: Ink drawings on white lined paper (as if from a notebook) in the segmented style of comic panels, with text from the Etheridge Knight poem “For Langston Hughes.” First image has a series of figures walking in a line across a landscape of varied shapes and textures with the title of the poem handwritten in the sky above them, followed by the line, “Another weaver of black dreams has gone.” Second image is a close portrait of a man or two men across several panels in a background of silhouettes and shapes with some continuing text from the poem, “we sat in June Bug’s pad with the shades drawn/ and the air thick with holy smoke.”]
Sun and softness, Sun and the beaten hardness of the earth, Sun and the song of all the sun-stars Gathered together— Dark ones of Africa, I bring you my songs To sing on the Georgia roads.
