Yvonne Blomer : On Langston Hughes and Watersheds

 

 

 

 

 

Recently, a few months ago now, Tanis MacDonald asked me about a quote I use in Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds for a show I was part of with Gary Barwin and Laurie D. Graham for Tanis’s Watershed Writers podcast. The quote is from Langston Hughes’ poem “A Negro Speaks of Rivers,” it goes like this “I’ve known rivers:/ I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. / My soul has grown deep like the rivers”.  It opens the section in Sweet Water on movement. When Tanis asked me, I couldn’t fully recall where I’d most recently seen the poem, though the lines resonate. When I was putting Sweet Water together, the varying aspects of rivers and watersheds was a part of the book I was curating – watersheds as vital sources of water, as sources that run into the oceans of the world, and rivers, the movement of people along waterways, connections between them, imperilled water ways and watersheds, the dangers to people imposed by flooding and forced movement due to labour and war, environmental changes and historical events. Hughes’ poem captures the movement of people and the deep and profound connection between people and rivers and through rivers, watersheds.

Hughes also connects a specific river, The Mississippi, to the movement of slaves, which he talks about in a recorded reading of the poem. But when I chatted with Tanis, I had for the moment, forgotten the recording.

Over the last several months, my son has been listening to nothing but a book he’s had since he was a baby, Poetry Speaks to Children, with its accompanying CD. He is fifteen now, was born with a rare genetic syndrome, was diagnosed with autism, and loves poetry. The book has ninety-five poems in it, and the CD has fifty-seven of them recorded by the poets or by other readers. These days, it is all we listen to in my car, from poem one, “The First Book,” by Rita Dove, all the way through to poem fifty-seven, “Brother” by Mary Ann Hoberman, and back to one again. My son can now recite the titles without the book. We have bought a second book because the CD will now only play in the car, so scratched is it. The new book is for the house. The poems have entered our family vernacular. At the dinner table, my husband and I have begun to recite parts of poems, or to use lines from poems for situations. We often tell each other that the dog is “as good as gold” from a poem called “Vowel Owl”. Just the other day, we had tofu dogs, our son’s choice. He likes to eat them from the middle, to which my husband said, “I suppose that’s one way, but I don’t like it.” then I said, “I prefer to eat my hotdog from one end.” Here is Robert Bly’s poem, which we are riffing off:

A Conversation With a Mouse by Robert Bly

One day a mouse called to me from his curly nest:
“How do you sleep? I love curliness.”

“Well, I like to be stretched out—I like the bones to be
All lined up. I like to see my toes way off over there.”

“I suppose that’s one way,” he said, “but I don’t like it.
The planets don’t act that way—nor the Milky Way.”

What could I say? You know you’re near the end
Of the century when a sleepy mouse brings in the Milky Way.

I have totally digressed. Let me rein myself back in here. What I’m trying to say is we are living and breathing this book, and we are all loving it. My son is memorizing not only titles, but the order of the poems on the CD, he is likely also memorizing the poems. His brain works this way. The poems are infiltrating our daily lives. The poem that infiltrated mine months ago, before we were listening to the CD all the time, was Langston Hughes “A Negro Speaks of Rivers” and his introduction to the poem.

Hughes’ voice travels through time into my car, as he again introduces the poem, he speaks of the time when he had just finished high school and was travelling by train to visit his dad in Mexico City. On the train, as he crossed the Mississippi river, he thought about the river and black people, and the slave trade.  “To be sold down the Mississippi could be one of the worst things that could happen to a negro slave,” Hughes says, speaking from his grandmother’s memories of the Mississippi. He speaks of how Lincoln saw the slaves being bought and sold there and signed the emancipation proclamation, eventually. Hughes lived from 1901 to 1967. At the time he wrote this poem, he was just out of high school in the 1920s. He wrote the poem on the back of a letter from his dad. You can listen to him here.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” my son whispers in the back of the car just as Hughes’ voice comes on. There is no other context in which my until-recently non-verbal son would use the word “negro” and I don’t say anything to him about it. Then the next time it comes on, I say “negro” is another word for black person.  We don’t use “negro” anymore. In my head I recall a doctor who used the word “retarded,” a word we also don’t use anymore. As we swing from poem to poem we hear “Ok Brown Girl, OK” by James Berry, also his “Jamaican Song”. These poems are lessons in race history, but others speak of animals, books, turning ten, as well as connections to place, emotion, time, rivers and watersheds, to literature and how the voices of the world are touched by their own place and history. I love the voices, many of them so familiar I’d know them anywhere – Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Janet Wong, Paul Muldoon. For a poet and a mom, the voices too are a watershed, a treasure of history and place.

But what am I writing about here? Watersheds. I’m writing about water, but also about my son, diverse ways of understanding the world and history. Black lives and poetry. Literature is what I’m writing about and how watershed is both a basin and a dividing point; a drainage point and the creatures that live on and from it; sweetness and the bitter root of past and present; of abled and disabled; movement of water and of people along waters. A turning point, or, as humans go, a slow and hopeful progression. One can’t ignore that Langston Hughes, who lived from 1901-1967, touched on historical moments that are still resonating the world over.  What can poetry teach my son, but rhythms of voice, story, humour, hyperbole, and the echoes of history in the future we long for.  Human time is a long river and he and his neurodiversity are a part of it.

 

 

 

Award winning poet and memoirist, Yvonne Blomer is the author of the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, and three books of poetry, most recently As if a Raven. She works as an editor, teacher and mentor in poetry and memoir. Yvonne served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015–2018. In 2017 Yvonne edited the anthology Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and in 2020, Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, both with Caitlin Press. The anthology Hologram for PK Page, which Yvonne co-edited, will be released with Ekstasis Editions in 2021 and In Ruins (working title) is forthcoming with Caitlin Press in 2022. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.