Arms tired from shoveling school canceled I settle into another day alone with my favorite border collie weathering what was heralded as The Blizzard of 2015 but here in Rhode Island turned out to be just another significant snowstorm.
Only in hardest hit places like Nantucket Plymouth and Scituate in nearby Massachusetts will this one be remembered as a truly distinguished storm. Here we have 4 foot snowdrifts dry and relatively light shoveling (deep but not heavy) we ve been spared loss of electricity flooding and snow banks over our heads.
It is wind that makes an otherwise only somewhat distinguished snowstorm into something worth noticing snow blown with such force it somehow finds itself on the wrong side of front and back doors (that s my house insufficient weather stripping and a generally lax attitude toward some home repairs also to blame) wind that changes direction after a time and maybe changes again creating the most exquisite wall sculptures surfaces looking like an ocean tide coming in water fanning out to the edges.
When you ve grown up in Los Angeles where I spent my first 18 years snow and wind together can still seem like miracles of weather. I m more apt to notice them than the (un)natural occurrences I grew up much more used to earthquakes ground giving way beneath your feet and ceilings showing their instability overhead sage brush scented wildfires fueled by the Santa Ana winds followed later by mudslides hills having lost their trees and other vegetation in that year s ritual burning literally slinging houses across the sand and sometimes even into the ocean.
With earthquakes I m intimate with fire less so those wildfires mostly not close enough to do much more than sting the lungs and eyes. I ve never lived quite near enough to dry canyons or to the ocean to be affected by mudslides though I ve known many people who have. I ve spent most of the rest of my life having traded up I think to East Coast seasonal changes with the occasional threat of hurricane or snowstorm but also with snow s falling and fallen beauty to firing sugaring trees to summer days so soft and watery you say later that there weren t enough of them this year.
A second snow day. I do nothing but dig out walk with the dog the best we can one of us older (in her time) the other prematurely arthritic in one of his joints. We stumble along. The rest of the time I ve been reading and writing. Liking this having the excuse to go slower time even relishing writing another recommendation (there are many to write this time of year and one always wants to sing praises as well as possible life reduced to shoveling walking eating writing and reading gives me a little more time to do that).
I ve been reading Yusef Komunyakaa s poetry again and re reading a couple of novelists I have read and loved before and now also do again. My books are scattered all over the house though rather neatly all things considered. I am blessed to live among loved ones who do not disturb open books and the who knows what trains of thought they are prompting.
I am also thinking about this Sunday Feb. 1 the 20th Annual Langston Hughes Poetry Reading from 1 to 3 30 p.m. at RISD s Metcalf Auditorium facilitated so many years now by the devoted Anne Clanton with assists from many among them Deborah Clemons educator in public programs at the RISD Museum April Brown and (so much depends upon) Ray Rickman. After many years of being always this time of year in Vermont at Goddard College attending winter residencies while teaching in the MFA Program in Interdisciplinary Arts I am actually home gearing up for my first Langston Hughes Poetry Reading (criminal I know).
I am thinking of slightly incendiary Hughes the subtly transgressive poet who could publish poems critical of his culture without hate mongers and other bigots seeming to know it. Some of his most insightful poems about race are simply questions in a series
Question 1
When the old junk man Death
Comes to gather up our bodies
And toss them into the sack of oblivion
I wonder if he will find
The corpse of a white multi millionaire
Worth more pennies of eternity
Than the black torso of
a Negro cotton picker
The only two things not contemporary in the poem are the words millionaire and Negro. Billionaires and more progressive ideas concerning the naming of identities being what they are two minute details seem to have lost their relevance. Still I can t help hearing in Hughes use of the word Negro (he uses it always famously in his first published poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers ) a tone of great irony there is no sense of belonging in the term it is an imposed given word not one freely chosen.
In the cadence down beated Than the black torso of/a Negro cotton picker the poet surfaces at once the sound of degradation and an insistence on equality. Pennies of eternity is one of those inspired phrases one always gets in a Hughes poem come judgment day nobody s worth any more than anyone else or if so by only cents. When it comes to race seemingly insurmountable challenges that Langston Hughes faced in his time the challenging times we live in ourselves as we witness riots murders or accidental deaths (depending upon whom you ask) and still widespread discrimination death puts everyone finally on an equal footing.
I love Hughes sneakiness will a whole white body (a corpse ) be worth anything close to just part of one (a torso ). Growing up Hughes poetry was in the water even in Los Angeles but maybe it takes a stark white snowstorm to give it the proper relief. Among other things he teaches us what it means to write always upon and against a white background. I am thinking of Theme for English B from his book Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951 deep thanks to my former teacher Arnold Rampersad for finally bringing out The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (in 1994 ) making the dating of both individual poems and collections possible.
Theme for English B
The instructor said
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let the page come out of you
Then it will be true.
I wonder if it s that simple
I am twenty two colored born in Winston Salem.
I went to school there then Durham then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down to Harlem
through a park then I cross St. Nicholas
Eighth Avenue Seventh and I come to the Y
the Harlem Branch Y where I take the elevator
up to my room sit down and write this page
Hughes is doing what his friend and sometime collaborator Zora Neale Hurston referred to as finding places with the tongue in your mouth. This poet has placed himself according to race and class time of life as well as geography. Certainly not many students at Columbia were then living at the Y the Y in Harlem as the poet would have you know not to be confused with the one on the Upper West Side. Differences as well as similarities Hughes later says in the poem will persist.
Well I like to eat sleep drink and be in love.
I like to work read learn and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present
or records Bessie bop or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored while I write
Being me it will not be white.
Hughes pipe smoker Bach as well as bop listener goes on to assert that he and his white teacher are part of each other because that s American though neither may like that truth. I can see him shaking his head now like my own grandmother while saying something like mmmhmm a fact s a fact.
As I learn from you
I guess you learn from me
although you are older and white
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
I am smiling now as I read this poem again. Even though I have no way of knowing whether or not his white teacher ever saw this page I am still struck by the bravery of a young black man speaking truth to power finding himself a foreigner on the starkly white Ivy League campus in a city he was growing to love.
He would only last the year (later he finished his education at Lincoln University a university founded by members of the 62nd Colored Infantry following the Civil War) but this paper is a testament that he still learned what he needed to learn during his brief time at Columbia a deep understanding of the ambivalences and intimacies and hypocrisies surrounding race in America an understanding that is of course also surprisingly (or not surprisingly) contemporary.
Happy Birthday Langston (as if I m saying it to my own son Gil who carries this beloved poet in his own middle name and often hears it lovingly from me instead of his first name). So glad to have you still among us.
Rick Benjamin Rhode Island s state poet laureate can be contacted at ribenjam gmail.com.
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