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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

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University of Pennsylvania

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

157 ratings

ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly "difficult." We encounter and discuss the poems one at a time. It's much easier than it seems! Join us and try it! Even though we are currently in our offseason ("SloPo"), you are welcome to enroll now. You will have access to the entire ModPo site. Explore; meet some ModPo'ers who are conversing in the site year-round; read poems and watch videos. Then join us again when the intense "symposium mode" starts up again in September. Yes, the next live, interactive 10-week session of ModPo will begin on September 8, 2018, and will conclude on November 19, 2018. Al Filreis will be in touch with you by email before the September 8 start of the course with all the information you'll need to participate. If you have questions, you can email the ModPo team at modpo@writing.upenn.edu. During the 10 weeks of the course, you will be guided through poems, video discussions of each poem, and community discussions of each poem. And (unique among open online courses) we offer weekly, interactive live webcasts. Our famed TAs also offer office hours throughout the week. We help arrange meet-ups and in-site study groups. If you are curious about the ModPo team, type "ModPo YouTube introduction" into Google or your favorite search engine, and watch the 20-minute introductory video. You will get an overview of the course and will meet the brilliant TAs, who will be encountering the poems with you all the way to the end. If you use Facebook, join the always-thriving ModPo group: from inside Facebook, search for "Modern & Contemporary American Poetry" and then request to be added as a member. If you have any questions about ModPo, you can post a question to the FB group and you'll receive an almost instant reply. We tweet all year long at @ModPoPenn and you can also find ModPo colleagues using the hashtag #ModPoLive. ModPo is hosted by—and is housed at—the Kelly Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia USA. All ModPo'ers are welcome to visit the Writers House when they are in our area. Our discussions are filmed there. Our live webcasts take place in the famed "Arts Cafe" of the House. To find out what's going on at the Writers House any time, just dial 215-746-POEM.

From the lesson

chapter 4 (week 5 cont.)—the Harlem Renaissance

We continue ModPo week 5 with chapter 4 and Harlem Renaissance poetry. We look at poets whose concept of the relation between traditional stanza form and the content of racist hatred helps us understand the limits of formal experiment. For example, Harlem Renaissance writers such as Jean Toomer (in works like Cane) engaged a modernist sense of genre, and Sterling Brown closely studied and admired the modernist “New”-ness of Ezra Pound even though Brown chose to write his own poems in rhymed blues verse and sometimes vernacular "folk" language. Claude McKay's strategic use of the Shakespearean sonnet is as powerful a refusal of free verse as can be found anywhere — his sense of the complicated inheritance of English prosody will come back to us at the very end of the course (watch for it in week 10). Countee Cullen uses the ballad form to similar effect, and for similar reasons. These poets, and others such as Langston Hughes, emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, but the influence of what was called “The New Negro” artistic renaissance (after the anthology compiled by Alain Locke) extended well beyond its time and deeply influenced later poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, whose poems “truth” and "Boy Breaking Glass" we will also read and discuss here in chapter 4. Brooks's idea of the truth is honored but also challenged, in turn, by a poet still later associated with the Black Arts movement: Etheridge Knight. Knight's response to Brooks (discussed in the PoemTalk episode linked to this week's syllabus) both reveres Brooks and at the same time urges further progress, just as Brooks's “truth” had revered and also moved beyond the McKay/Cullen mode. In "Boy Breaking Glass," Brooks understands a young man's "cry for art" as requiring a sympathetic modernist fragmentation in her own poem. Poetic influences are cultural ripples, never more so than here — an emanation but also a widening. Langston Hughes's “Dinner Guest: Me” is partly about how such ripple effect and communality sometimes must be taught. And because it must be taught, we felt it apt to add a special video (prepared for ModPo's Teacher Resource Center) on how teachers might teach that challenging poem by Hughes.

watch video discussion of Cullen’s “Incident”16:06

watch video on McKay's "If We Must Die"19:26

watch video on Hughes's "Dinner Guest: Me"18:59

watch video on teaching Hughes’s “Dinner Guest: Me”20:00

watch video on Brooks’s “Boy Breaking Glass”27:34

Meet the Instructors

Al Filreis
Kelly Professor, Dir. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Faculty Dir. Kelly Writers House

>> So this is a poem by Langston Hughes called Dinner Guest: Me.

It's a very famous poem.

And I guess I want to start by asking someone just to describe the scene.

There's a little story being told here.

Molly what's the scene?

>> There's a, a dinner party on Park Avenue and

there are lots of expensive foods and nice wines and, [CROSSTALK].

>> What are some of the foods and wines?

What do we get?

>> Fraises des Bois is like a really expensive little strawberry from

the woods.

>> A strawberry from the woods.

Is there a little irony in serving strawberries from the woods there on

Park Avenue?

It's sort of fake.

What was, what was, you know, sort of a, a nut, a basic dinner and yet.

>> It's like fake rustic almost.

>> Fake rustic.

That's the phrase.

Okay, go ahead, Molly.

What else?

>> And it sounds like it's all white people except for, like say, Hughes.

He's the dinner guest and he's.

>> So he is the dinner guest, the speaker.

We'll, we'll call him Hughes but it's the eye is a dinner guest, and

what is the discomfort here?

It's sort of obvious, but I might as well ask.

Ally, what's the discomfort?

>> Well that the guest is the sole black person at,

at the event, >> So

he must stand in for the entire negro problem.

>> Right.

>> Which he finds difficult.

Okay, so does anybody want to say anything about the Negro Problem.

It's a capital P, why,

without really identifying the reference, why capitalize P?

What does that typically do then?

Anna?

>> Well it makes it a personified proper noun you know, you, you really look at it.

Negro Problem, as like, as like an entity.

>> It's a thing, it's a thing that's known >> It's an object.

>> Outside the poem.

Lily?

>> He is intentionally calling all the references that would come to

mind based on that phrase.

Like, instead of, if it was lowercase you might think that he was

doing something maybe not, not like trying to directly

call all of the associations and people involved in movements.

And whatever, like associated with that phrase and he's very intentionally

pointing it out because he feels uncomfortable that now though it's like

a mul, a phrase that represents and talks about multiple, many things.

He has become all of those things at the dinner table because he's

the only black person at the table.

>> I know I am the Negro Problem.

Well, the Negro Problem refers to some very specific phraseology,

both on the pro-Civil Rights and end of, pro end of of Jim Crow left.

And also a phrase that was used among supporters of Jim Crow in the South.

We have a Negro problem.

He's probably referring to lib, the liberal left sense of it.

Okay, the negro problem.

And so, I know I am the Negro Problem.

Max translate that.

I know I am, why am?

>> He's here symbolizing this, Nego, well he's the token black person at this party

of hand-wringing pseudo-intellectuals who are worrying about that, the negro

problem, and what are we going to do and they feel so bad for being white.

and, instead of actually coming up with solutions for the problem they just keep

on going on with their sort of bourgeois upper-class lifestyle on Park Avenue.

And they just kind of dwell in this intellectual space by

hanging out with Harlem renaissance poets and being like oh,

this is, this is how we're solving the Negro problem, but it's so unsolvable.

>> So we should come back to a discussion of how, how the poem makes us,

deliberately make us uncomfortable.

It does it very successfully but let's,

let's, let's go to a different topic for a minute, which is the rhyme, the form.

So Ammarise, what's the form of this poem?

It's, it's pretty rough.

>> well, there are rhymes scattered through out like, white.

I don't think it's a regular form.

>> It's not a regular form, but there's a lot of rhymes.

Let's go through them.

>> We've got dined and mined.

>> Mm-hm.

>> way, way.

Night and white.

>> Way and U.S.A. and way.

>> Okay, yep.

Divine and mine.

Eight and wait.

>> Okay, so we have regular rhymes irregularly strewn through this.

What does he mean to, why, what's, Emily what's the form here?

Why, why is this poem written the way it is?

>> the, rhymes as rhymes do necessarily give weight to

the sentiment being expressed in each of them.

>> Okay, Dave what's the effect of the rhyme for you as a reader?

>> Well it, just like Emily said, it emphasizes things, but

it also calls to mind some type of traditional form inside of it,

but he's still playing with it, and, and doing his own thing.

>> Okay, and how does the rhyme work at the very end?

To be a problem on Park Avenue at eight.

Eight, what does that refer to, Allie?

>> The time.

>> 8 o'clock, yes, of an evening.

To be a problem on Park Avenue at eight is not so bad.

Solutions to the problem, of course, wait.

Okay, so let's talk about that rhyme.

How that rhyme works.

Anna? >> Well, it sets up kind of

a wringing intense juxtaposition between this very,

kind of bourgeois upper-class lovely dinner hour, dinner at eight.

>> Mm-hm.

>> On Park Avenue.

>> Mm-hm. >> And then wait,

which is just like, ends with a period there, it's just like.

And how thematically does that work?

We've got, we got time, a specific time for this dinner.

And then. >> And then, waiting.

>> So no time.

Max?

>> Well I think, I think to be a problem on Park Avenue it is interesting because

there's actually, in pre-Civil Rights or, even today.

There's two ways to be a problem on Park Avenue at eight.

Like you can either be you can be black on Park Avenue at eight and

get stopped and frisked.

Or you can be representative of the problem for

your sort of pseudo-intellectual friends.

>> Probably not the superficially positive sense, the liberal positive sense.

>> Yes, yes, exactly.

So, I think that,

that there's actually two problems going on there both happening in, at eight.

And I think that really raises the stakes around this wait.

Right, like, it's not one problem we're talking about.

We're talking about potentially many problems.

And shh, there's nothing to do but wait.

>> If I said the following to you,

that this poem is partly saying that race is a social construction.

Which is, by now a kind of common phrase you'll hear in English departments,

race is a social construction.

Let's try to understand the word social here.

Race is a social construction.

As it may be even more basically than it

is a political construction because this is about politics.

It's about liberal leftists, white liberal leftists trying to

understand one of their black colleagues, right, and inviting him to dinner.

>> Mm-hm.

>> Even more basically than it is a political construction, and

certainly it is not necessarily a natural fact, race.

So if it's a social construction, why write a poem like this?

>> Well, because this is like, this in itself is a social construction, right?

Having dinner guests over, that's kind of like a social convention maybe, it's work.

>> In the, in the, yeah, in the most basic sense of social, right?

>> Yeah. >> You

want a poem that explains how race is a social construction?

Have a guy go to dinner with, with the white liberals, that make sense?

Okay, so now let's get to discomfort.

Max, why does this all make you uncomfortable?

>> It's, it makes me uncomfortable because in,

in many ways it asks us to do what the dinner guests are doing.

There's the phrase that I that I just want to call our attention to again.

The, the, Fraises des Bois.

As Molly said this is sort of like rustic fruit that's like, suddenly out of

place but, of course, I think it's also a pun on the phrases of W.E.B. Du Bois.

>> It might be a pun on W.E.B. Du Bois, possibly.

>> So you have these people who are murmuring gently,

sort of parodying Du Bois a little bit, which is what I'm doing right now.

And then, and in that respect, sort of like, consuming him as this, this,

kind of like, this like little fruit thing, this like, little, exotic rustic.

>> So it's not just Dinner Guest: Me, but for

dinner they're serving me, I'm being consumed?

>> Yes. >> Okay, now.

>> And then [CROSSTALK].

>> What are we consuming, Max McKenna?

What are we consuming?

>> What are we consuming?

>> Yes, right now.

>> As, as the eight or nine of us around the table?

>> Yes, yes.

>> well, we are also consuming Langston Hughes.

>> We're consuming him through an anthologizable poem, and, you know,

we are trying to figure out how he can be read.

Dinner Guest: Me.

Okay, so, let's go with this meta peta, meta poetry for a second.

It's actually also meta pedagogical.

>> Right. >> Why, Max?

Meta pedagogical?

>> Well, because it's,

it's kind of telling us about how we're reading it, right?

And it's so it's, it's about its own process, but

it's also about how, you know, it seems to be one step ahead of us.

And, and, and it's thinking about how we're,

we're reading it, approaching it and consuming it.

>> Allie?

>> Yeah, I also think that the rhythm is really important.

In adding to that, because it, it keeps escalating down.

Being wined and dined, answering the usual questions that come to

mind which seek demurely it, it, it's adding on to its own description.

And so, when you get to the end,

especially since the poems leading us the entire way as readers.

>> Right. >> That wait is even more halting.

Because it just leaves you with that, alright now what, as readers.

>> So well said, it leads us quickly through the rush of the rhyme,

increasing rush of the rhyme, to wait.

Yeah.

I usually, go ahead Dave.

>> I just think that, that's what makes, me as a reader more uncomfortable, is the,

of course, wait,

because, that implies that all of this concern is really lip service.

>> Mm-hm.

>> It's just B-S.

So, if I'm, sort of the white person at the, at the table.

He's just basically said, my concern is really just lip service.

I'm not doing anything about the problem, even though, I'd like to act like I am.

>> Reece? >> And jumping off of that, yeah.

I think the rhyme really enhances that feeling, because it's so

satisfying to reach that end rhyme.

Yet and he has that tone of sort of, I want awareness and

attachment that the whole thing is performative.

And it's not even a conversation between people,

it's between the questions that are being asked.

Solution is capitalized.

If you picture name cards for people who are invited.

It's the negro problem, and then the white interlopers, right?

So it's such a satisfying sonic ending to a really dissatisfying problem.

>> A little bit like, though the politics are different,

the December remember rhyme in Countee Cullen's incident.

Because there, remember teaches you that a formal poem,

not a modernist poem in that case, a formal poem, traditional rhyming poem.

Is more likely to be remembered, and that that poem is about trying to retain

the memory of a racist hatred that the boy, the speaker, experienced.

I believe that what Hughes is doing is even more complicated,

because the racist hatred he's experiencing is a hatred of generosity and

love and sentimentally and appreciation.

>> Well, I think that the way that this end rhyme is structured in

the sense that eight and wait rhyme.

But really, it's not so, is not so

bad, and of course wait are more linked, like visually.

And, those would be the lines you kind of expect to rhyme if this was a more,

whatever, like making more traditional rhyming poems.

So I think, the fact that, the, the, not so badness, of having a fancy house

on Park Avenue, and serving a nice dinner is linked with the waiting for a solution.

Like that this, self-satisfaction and comfort is what's

preventing real discourse and actual, like, engagement with the Negro problem.

>> Great, let's get some final words.

Let's go around and

see if we can add some things that haven't been said yet about this remarkable poem.

We'll start with you, Emily.

Final thought on this?

>> What you said about the poem being meta pedagogical stuck with me

a little because this is in a sense a pedagogical moment.

He's being asked to speak for the Negro problem and

therefore, teach about, the Negro problem.

In a way which is, well, he's not succeeding in teaching these

dinner guests about what the experience is of a black men in this time period.

I do think that the poem itself effectively teaches us what his

experience is.

It's a moment of failed pedagogy which becomes for us a successful pedagogy.

>> Hm, that's a great point.

And it, and it, it comes as close as any poem I've read comes to trying to situate

what might be called the white reader as, as analogy to the white diner, right?

Sympathetic, let's just say liberal on the question of Civil Rights.

And made to be uncomfortable in a way that these diners are and that's the separation

from it that we have to achieve or we're just, or we're just jerks.

Yeah.

Ammarise, final thought?

>> Exactly, it teaches us but it's learning us to what we

are already aware of since we share and Langston Hughes awareness.

So, the fact that he gives us all these visual delicacies and

it's so beautiful and colorful.

We're being fed all these delicacies that now we have to walk away

from knowing that we should have action and awareness in a different direction.

>> Well put.

Dave? >> I think it's interesting that

all these visual delicacies take up the majority of the poem which is a,

that's what's really being presented.

And it's much shorter when you get to the real point which is sort of

subsumed within all that window dressing.

>> Nice. Ally?

>> Yeah and I think one of the reasons it's, it's so poignant especially reading

it in 2014 is that despite approaching it from,

from that distance despite how many political advances have been made.

For example, although they're still, of course, that's by no means done.

Putting it in such a, as you pointed out in many ways social

context is so brilliant because it addresses the more

the nuances of just kind of more de facto social racism.

>> Right.

Racist by this point, really a social construction.

It is a social thing.

Anna?

>> I think I just, getting back to just kind of what Emily and

Ammarise were saying about the meta pedagogical moment.

I think it, this poem teaches me as a reader how to be uncomfortable when I

read a poem and that's a really, it's hard to be this,

like, squirmy when you read a, when you're reading a poem.

But I, it just, I don't know that final wait, it's just like, sucker punch.

>> Cool, Lilly?

>> A phrase I like from the first stanza is the or the,

the part of the same setting where Langston then cues or the speakers being

called on to answer how things got this way which is a kind of a question that.

Is only helpful if you're going to look systemically at, like,

a very big picture and not,

it doesn't work if you're just going to ask one person in the same way that.

Like the, it's so, it's, we just have one speaker giving us his poem, and

he's very uncomfortable being a singular speaker.

And so we that in the story of the poem and also somewhat in the form.

>> Nice. He's

very uncomfortable being a singular speaker.

He's been put in, put in the position of being a symbol.

>> Right. >> Molly?

>> I almost feel like the speaker feels like he is part of,

part of the problem, because solutions are not offered at all, and like Dave said.

A lot of the poem was taken up by this sort of very, you know, rich imagery.

And there, there almost seems to be a little bit of guilt just for

sort of playing into it and coming to the dinner party and being a part of

that type of conversation where there's no real change being affected.

>> Yeah, if we had more time we would explore whether some of

that guilt leaks into the quote, unquote, easy rhythms, right?

The poem itself might be too accessible in a way.

That's, that's very complicated.

Max, what do you think? >> I think that that accessibility is part

of it though because I think this poem is in conversation with, like, formalists

approaches to reading and there's so many sort of scenes of reading here.

You know, of, you know,

the usual questions of the gentle probing, of the murmuring over, right?

So, in like many ways,

you know, the dinner guests, Langston Hughes is this poem and

what we're doing to him is what the dinner guests do to him and we're kind of.

>> Yes.

>> It's, I think with the rhymes and everything,

he wants to kind of create this seemingly easy formless poem, but, you know,

in reality he's already preempted all the sorts of like, approaches and

heuristics we're going to take to it.

>> Wow, that's really good.

He's, he's also created the possibility for

feeling bad about anthologizing the poem.

About making the poem stand in, this is my pose, Langston Hughes poem.

Right?

Are we doing the wrong thing, by making him symbolize the Harlem renaissance?

By making him symbolize the Negro problem by situating a white reader

in, in such a way as to consume this poem, and check that box.

So it really just, it has the potential of bringing the whole course down.

>> Yeah. >> [LAUGH].

>> And I think he would be

very pleased that he created such a thing.

And one final word, you know, he's always at risk here of using leftist cliches,

darkness USA, the current, current democratic night.

These are easy, political slogans.

But he allows himself to do it because he's been put in

the position by white readers and white diners and white dinner inviters.

Into being a symbol and

so he's going to give the slogans because that's what they want.

And so the slogans get to be framed and

he gets to do it without the, the political cliche ruining the thing.

Amazing.

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