Jazz Age Poet

The author of such poems as I, To; Sing America; and The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Langston Hughes combined his experiences and emotions with the rhythms and themes he found in jazz music to create an exciting new style of poetry. Throughout his lifetime, Hughes won many awards and honors for his various books of poetry, novels, short stories, plays, children’s books, autobiographies, and magazine articles. Despite always struggling to succeed financially, Hughes never gave up trying to be a better writer, and a better man.

The author of such poems as I, To; Sing America; and The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Langston Hughes combined his experiences and emotions with the rhythms and themes he found in jazz music to create an exciting new style of poetry. Throughout his lifetime, Hughes won many awards and honors for his various books of poetry, novels, short stories, plays, children's books, autobiographies, and magazine articles. Despite always struggling to succeed financially, Hughes never gave up trying to be a better writer, and a better man.

A biography of the African-American poet and author Langston Hughes.

A vital and surprising hardcover collection of poems about, and inspired by, jazz music. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET. Selected and Edited by Kevin Young. Ever since its first flowering, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry; this scintillating anthology offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music that inspired them. From the Harlem Renaissance to the beat movement, from the poets of the New York school to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force—one that Jazz Poems makes palpable. We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, William Matthews, and C. D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz’s great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration. Includes: • “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret” by Langston Hughes • “God Bless the Child” by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr. • “Jazz Fantasia” by Carl Sandburg • “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” by William Carlos Williams • “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks • “Chasing the Bird” by Robert Creeley • “Victrola” by Robert Pinsky • “Pres Spoke in a Language” by Amiri Baraka • “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara • “Art Pepper” by Edward Hirsch • “Snow” by Billy Collins Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

A picture book biography that will inspire readers to dance to their own beats! Singer, dancer, actress, and independent dame, Josephine Baker felt life was a performance. She lived by her own rules and helped to shake up the status quo with wild costumes and a you-can’t-tell-me-no attitude that made her famous. She even had a pet leopard in Paris! From bestselling children’s biographer Jonah Winter and two-time Caldecott Honoree Marjorie Priceman comes a story of a woman the stage could barely contain. Rising from a poor, segregated upbringing, Josephine Baker was able to break through racial barriers with her own sense of flair and astonishing dance abilities. She was a pillar of steel with a heart of gold—all wrapped up in feathers, sequins, and an infectious rhythm.

Embracing the entire history of jazz poetry, the work defines this inspired literary genre as poetry necessarily informed by jazz music. It discusses the major figures and various movements from the racist poems of the 1920s to contemporary times when the tone of jazz poetry experienced a dramatic change from elegy to celebration. The jazz music of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane transliterated into poetry by the likes of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown is but a part of this vital work. This unusual volume will be of interest to scholars and students of literature, music, American and African Studies, and popular culture as well as anyone who enjoys jazz and poetry. Emphasis is given to a call and response between white and African American writers. The earliest jazz poems by white writers from the 1920s, for example, reflected the general anxieties evoked by jazz, particularly regarding race and sexuality, and jazz did not fully become embraced in American verse until Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown published their first books in 1926 and 1932, respectively. By the 1950s, jazz poetry had become a fad, featuring jazz and poetry in performance, and this book spends considerable time addressing the energetic but often wildly unsuccessful work by dominantly white, West coast writers who turned to Charlie Parker as their hero. African American poets from the 1960s, however, focused more on John Coltrane and interpreted his music as a representation of the Black Civil Rights movement. Jazz poetry from the 1970s to the present has had less to do with this call and response between races, and the final two chapters discuss contemporary jazz poetry in terms of its dramatic change in tone from elegy to joy.

A collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best drinking stories makes this the most intoxicating New Directions Pearl yet!

Seminar paper from the year 1998 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (American Studies Department), course: American Modernism, language: English, abstract: How did Langston Hughes shape music into poetry, what were the items of his jazz poetry and what message did he want to mediate? Concerning the items and message of jazz poetry, secondary literature offers no help. Reading Hughes' jazz poems and combining it with the status of jazz music and Hughes' view of art, the following assumptions are plausible: Hughes’ jazz poetry tries with literary devices to imitate jazz music. This poetry reflects to reflect modern, urban black poplar culture. His poems transmit a new black self- confidence. The aim of this paper is to give reasons for those assumptions by analyzing a jazz poem closely. The poem that is to be analyzed is called „Railroad Avenue“ and was published first in 1926.