This essay explores the relationship between Langston Hughes’s 1930s poetry and the Soviet avant-garde theater. It argues that the constructivist theater provides an aesthetic framework through which to read Hughes’s radical poetry. Often read as an artistic failure, Hughes’s 1930s verse—especially his 1938 pamphlet A New Song—represents, I suggest, a formal response to shifting ideologies of poetic labor, namely, an effort to disentangle poetry from capitalist individualism and align it with proletarian collective labor. I argue that Hughes’s socialist poems represent an attempt to refigure poetic labor as a collective act, and I explore the implications that this has for the survival of the lyric poem and lyric modes of address. This article devotes sustained attention to a long-neglected period of Hughes’s career and provides a new reading of the Soviet avant-garde’s influence on US culture in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, it shows that these concerns and tensions are relevant to a broader arc of African American poetic history, from the twentieth century to the poetry of the present day.
This chapter explores the sonic possibilities of the Chinese characters in Ezra Pound’s late cantos. Specifically it examines how Pound understood Chinese sound in his late career, and traces what he did with this new understanding in the late cantos. Despite Pound’s enthusiasm for Chinese sound, critics have tended to approach the characters as silent, static material forms, unable to be sounded by the reader, which are antithetical to the lyrical elements of the late cantos and obstruct the poem’s prosodic flow. Arguing against the understanding of the ideograms as merely ‘silent’ objects, this chapter traces how the characters both communicate with and shape the poem’s rhythm and prosody, and what this, in turn, means for Pound’s reader. In doing so, it examines the unstable but productive interchange between graphic and phonetic signification in the late cantos, between image and sound, and explores what a fuller understanding of Pound’s late rehabilitation of Chinese sound might mean for our understanding of the problematic final stages of Pound’s epic.
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