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In anticipation of the upcoming rerelease of several Diana Wynne Jones titles, I am reviewing Fire & Hemlock, one of my all time favorite DWJ books, for my April column. FIre & Hemlock is a modern retelling of the "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer" ballads and opens with Oxford student Polly realizing she has blocked out a significant part of her past. Through a long series of flashbacks she recalls her lost memories and then, in the book's final section, discovers her connection to the old ballads and understands how her life has taken a decidedly mythic (and dangerous) turn.

I read Fire & Hemlock on the heels of another mythic fiction title, The China Garden by Liz Berry (sadly it's out of print). In that novel, Clare is spending her last summer at home before college when her widowed mother surprises her by announcing she has taken a home health care position with an elderly man in the distant village where her family is from. She expects Clare to stay in London with friends but something compels Clare to dig in her heels and insist on going along. Once they arrive she learns that everything she thought she knew about her mother was incorrect and the entire village knows all about Clare and there is an expectation that she will contribute to the area's rejuvenation. Clare has no idea what is going on but bit by bit she learns that her bloodline, and specifically she herself, is critical to everyone. There is a movement to sell critical land for the storage of nuclear waste, (could there be a greater metaphor for poisoning the land?) and Clare is the one to stop it. She has no idea how (or why it is her) but as the pages unfold and the mystery is revealed and Berry shares clues about standing stones, maze construction and even the story of Demeter and Persephone, readers begin to realize that this novel is about old myths, not something of recent construction like so much current teen fantasy. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.)

In sharp contrast to paranormal fantasy, Mythic fiction hearkens back across centuries. It challenges us on what we believe both as a culture and personally. Coming from an Irish family which is, by habit, rooted deep in superstitions both social and religious (don't even talk to me about St Patrick), I found a lot of both The China Garden and Fire & Hemlock to be quite affecting. These books reminded me of what I find lacking in a lot of modern paranormal titles for teens. For all the thrills and chills with zombies or bloodsuckers or, on the flip side, dystopian nightmares, those titles just don't seem to have staying power for me. When you read DWJ and Berry you realize how old stories have a special resonance and power. No one thinks Twilight will come true but read about standing stones in The China Garden and you wonder because we still don't know why those stones are out here with us or what their power is.

I love both of these books and strongly recommend them. Here's hoping The China Garden will someday enjoy the reissuing attention that some of DWJ's greats will receive in April (More on that as the books appear.)

[Post pic of Stonehenge in winter taken by Reuters.]

Locus has the nominees for the World Fantasy Awards and I was quite pleased to see Kij Johnson there as well as Emma Bull's Territory, Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel and Coyote Road. (You can read Kij's short story here and I encourage you to do so - this one remains one of the most impressive and original pieces of writing I've read in a long time.) The best bit I think is Terri Windling & Midori Snyder for Endicott Studio which will have its final issue up later this month and, I'm thrilled to report, includes an essay by me on the myths of the John Franklin expedition.

I studied the Franklin expedition and all the rescue expeditions which followed many times in grad school. (One semester I even took an entire course strictly on the literature of polar exploration.) A lot of myths died with Franklin and his men, while others struggled valiantly on, refusing to diminish even in the face of so much avoidable tragedy. Just what went wrong - and the sequence of events which led to the disappearance of two ships and their crews - has long been one of the most enduring mysteries of the Arctic. There's a lot to write there, and a lot of books (and articles and essays) have been written on Sir John, his wife, the men who sent him north and the men who tried to find him. (A lot of those guys became famous too.) In writing about the World Fantasy finalists this week though, Jeff VanderMeer seemed very disappointed that one recent Franklin book wasn't on that list: "Territory is one of my favorites from last year, and I'm happy to see it on the list. I also think the others are solid, solid novels. But I'd put Michael Cisco's The Traitor up against any one of them. Or Ekaterina Sedia's A Secret History of Moscow. Or Hal Duncan's Ink. Or, perhaps most criminally, Dan Simmons' The Terror, a novel that in scope and execution dwarfs everything just mentioned. "

I completely agree that Sedia's wonderful novel belonged on the list (I've already written at length about my love for it) but Dan Simmons' The Terror? That is a book that bothered me on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. I am not sure if my distaste for the book is due to my own academic background or my years living in a northern landscape but I was really bothered by The Terror and couldn't enjoy it on a thriller/horror level (like I have enjoyed Simmons' books in the past.) The biggest issue for me was that Simmons writes entirely about real people - actual sailors who actually died of unknown causes in the Arctic and were never found - and turns them into monsters. They are not just driven to eat the remains of their fallen crewmembers, they actually hunt and murder each other for meat. The whole time I was reading the final third of the book I couldn't help but think that if these guys put half the energy they did into killing each other into hunting for seals then they might have managed to save themselves. But in Simmons version of events it was not so much about survival but relentless murder mostly just for the sake (and pleasure?) of killing. At one point the ringleader (a guy who never rated more than casual mention in histories about the expedition), can't remember who he has ordered to kill who and why he has chosen some to live and some to die. It's like a polar Apocalypse Now in some ways and I guess on a fictional level readers might enjoy seeing a bunch of British officers and men try to trap and evade each other (all the while dying of starvation and cold) except these were real men and they wouldn't have done this; nobody ever did this. It just seemed wrong somehow to turn real men into monsters for the sake of story. And it didn't help that the officers all managed to be noble while the men were the murderers.

The other thing that bothered me about the book was the character of the native woman who managed to be (and I'm not exaggerating):

1. Beautiful
2. Mysterious
3. Conveniently not able to speak
4. Wise beyond her years in terms of survival
5. Possibly in control of the Yeti-like creature that attacks the sailors
6. A virgin (as verified by the ship's doctor in a passing mention that I still don't understand)
7. Sexually aggressive - and apparently quite the roll in the hay....even though she is a virgin (and the officer she "catches" is somehow the sexual neophyte)
8. The earth mother type who still merrily leads the way while pregnant or carrying a baby on her back
9. And she saves the big white hero from his own men - of course.

In case you miss how all powerful, all knowing, and utterly irresistible she is, Simmons throws in the myth of Sedna to convince you that the whole thing might be destiny somehow - that the white explorer must meet and be converted by the mythic icon of (apparently) all native woman. It was so 19th century in terms of viewing a native character and so 19th century in how the uneducated white men lose control of themselves and wreak havoc while the white officers can only wonder how it has all degraded to such an appalling level and so 19th century in that the single survivor would choose to - literally - "go native" with his sexy companion that I felt like I was reading a parody rather than a 21st century novel.

Just because the ships disappeared in the 19th century doesn't mean we have to regress to literary stereotypes when writing about them, does it?

Even now though, I don't know if it's me or Simmons that was wrong here. A ton of people whose opinions I value (VanderMeer among them) loved this book. But I don't and I can't. The history gets in the way of the fiction for me, big time. Is it wrong to think that you should tread a little more lightly on history - a little more respectfully? I don't know. But for the record there is no evidence in any polar expedition that a group of men ever rose up against the others and hunted them for food. Mostly they just died, cold and alone, thousands of miles from home. Mostly, they just died. And while that is not exciting, it is the way it was.

And there were no mute sex kittens roaming the high north either.

[Post pic of Franklin's ships: the Erebus & Terror.]

I have been enjoying Ekaterina Sedia's Secret History of Moscow and finding it wonderful reading. I have no idea how this is going to end but what has impressed me thus far is the seamless way Sedia blends her mythic elements. You have old myths, such as the rusalki and kikimora, that are side by side with modern myths, such as the wife of a Decembrist. One moment there is a meeting with Father Frost and the next a discussion of the Vavilov Institute and Trofim Lysenko. Sedia has done so much homework to make an appropriately modern urban fantasy about Russia and I am deeply impressed. This could not have been an easy book to write and yet it reads as if it is - perhaps one of the biggest compliments I can pay a writer.

I've been thinking about modern myths quite a bit lately, especially since I saw a brief mention at Ed's about Jon Krakauer writing a book called The Hero (or not writing it as the article explains). I've written about my displeasure of Into the Wild before, not because I think Krakauer is a bad writer (he's a great writer) but because of his habit of becoming too emotionally attached to his nonfiction subjects - to the detriment of truth. As the author was so willing to make a hero out of Chris McCandless, I can only imagine what lengths he might go to for others who are part of a book on the very subject of heroics. This of course makes me wonder why we (as a culture) seem to choose the heroes we do, and the lengths we will go to in order to hide the truth about those we choose.

Chris McCandless is particularly frustrating for me because everything we did at the Company was about surviving in the wilderness - it was about making the wilderness survivable. That was the whole point of early aviation in Alaska. Right now I'm writing the last couple of pages about the wilderness and flying and the demand for heroics at the drop of a hat. It's interesting how no one can name anyone who reached the peak of Mt McKinley, let alone the pilot who is credited with saving more climbers and knowing the mountain better than anyone alive (with the exception of Branford Washburn) yet everyone knows the guy who walked off the highway near Denali and starved to death.

Let me write that again - he walked off the highway and starved to death.

The only reason McCandless is a hero is because Jon Krakauer made him one. Millions of people are impressed with him because one man was impressed with him. And then he didn't tell the truth when he wrote his book, just so you would love his hero even more.

This is the masterful creation of a modern myth but in the most skewed manner imaginable - take the frontier myth of survival, the heroic myth of overcoming a great difficulty and bringing a boon back to the "village" and mix both into the tale of a foolish young man who died through his own lack of preparedness. The only gift he has is the story of his completely avoidable failure. In the last century we had cowboys and astronauts, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Now we have death from starvation mere miles from a highway. My how things have changed.

[Post pic of St George & the dragon, of course.]

Ain't Nothing But A Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry by Scott Reynolds Nelson with Marc Aronson is reviewed in the NYT this week. As the book is about Nelson's search for the truth behind the John Henry ballad it reads as a nonfiction detective/history book (written for 9-12 year olds but I think actually skews older than that) and the reviewer didn't want to reveal Nelson's conclusions in the review. I just read the book and want to talk about those conclusions - so this is post is all spoilers and should be read as such.

The John Henry ballad is as well known as the stories of Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed and Mike Fink - meaning if you've read any tall tales in school or at home, then you know a bit about these guys. John Henry was the steel driving man who went against a steam drill and won the contest but died as a result of his exertions. It's a ballad that celebrates men over machine and honors the hard work of those men who laid America's railroads. It is also one of the few American story about an African American man that has completely crossed color lines - John Henry is known just as well to white kids as black, and is just as ever present in literature as Bunyan and all the others. His story is a truly American story and has always been celebrated as such.

In recently reading American tall tales, folk legends, etc. to my son, I've been struck by some odd aspects of John Henry's story. First, the story is born completely from the ballad and the ballad's origins are fuzzy at best. It is clear that it is a "work song" - a song written to be sung by work gangs, in this case gangs of men who work on the railroad. That makes it a story that must date to the mid - late 19th century as it fits perfectly with American's railroad history. Some of the common aspects of the many versions of the ballad are the Allegheny Mountains, C&O Railroad and Big Bend Tunnel. This has lead many people to believe the story of John Henry's contest took place in Virginia and that he died working on the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia (where there is a nearby statue of John Henry). Not everyone believes this though - some think he was in Alabama. But what really bothered me about the story itself is that John Henry died. Nobody else dies in these stories - they just keep having their adventures forever and ever. (Okay, in some Johnny Appleseed dies, but it is of old age after he travels the whole Ohio River Valley planting apples.) I want to know why John Henry had to die. It didn't make sense the first time I learned this story and it didn't fit with the tall tale tradition. As it turns out though, for Nelson it is John Henry's death that explains the ballad and ultimately, for me anyway, what makes it more of an American tale than any of the others will ever hope to be.

The big reveal in his book is that John Henry was probably a prisoner, an inmate at the Virginia Penitentiary where convicts were rented out to the C&O Railroad in the late 1800s for 25 cents a day. Nelson found a convict named John William Henry who arrived at the prison in 1866 and later transferred at an unknown date to an unknown location. Nelson found though that when the penitentiary was torn down in 1992 a contractor discovered 300 skeletons - probably African Americans from the late 1800s. There were no gravestones to mark their bodies, or records revealing their names. It is known that hundreds of prisoners died working on the Lewis Tunnel - in 1872 one out of every ten. Records on the John Henry that Nelson discovered disappear after 1872; whether he is THE John Henry, Nelson can not say. But what happened to a lot of men like John Henry is clear - they died building a railroad and no one remembers them, no one remembers anything about them at all.

Except for a song about a man who had only his strength and his pride to call his own - that man they made sure we would all remember.

If indeed John Henry was a prisoner who worked himself to death in the unsafe conditions of the Lewis Tunnel and if he was buried in an unmarked grave hidden on the prison grounds where no one would or could ever find him then he is the most American hero of any of the tall tales. As much as we like to embrace our hard working frontier image and as much as we salute blue collar workers, in reality America struggles more and more as a society of class based on personal wealth. Right now all the people running for president are arguing over who is more in touch with the "real Americans", (Hillary Clinton thinks swinging back a shot of whiskey in a bar makes her as real as it gets apparently), and yet not one of them lives like a poor American or quite frankly wants to.

I don't want to. I've been poor and I'll tell you right now it sucked. Being poor means wanting more, all the time, everyday and that's the truth. Yet lately it seems like if you pull yourself out of poverty then you aren't a real American anymore. If you go to an ivy league college then you aren't authentic enough somehow. The commentators are falling over themselves to say that the people in dying communities with no jobs are as real as it gets. So John Henry as a working class hero is the uber American story. I wonder what everyone thinks now that he might just be a victim of the racial politics of the American justice system.

Or more to the point: when did we decide that the only real Americans were the ones who struggled endlessly and when did we stop trying to end the damn struggle?

The myth of John Henry is that he was a man who worked with his hands, challenged a machine on behalf of all men who work with their hands and beat it. Then he died like a working class martyr with the words: "A man ain't nothing but a man. Before I let your steam drill beat me down, I'll die with a hammer in my hand." He was never more than what he could do - never more than the work he accomplished for others.

That's not the kind of life my father wanted, not for himself, and not for his children.

The truth is that John Henry probably worked for men he did not choose, at a job he did not choose, in a place he did not choose. And he died there because death was the only freedom he was given. With forty percent of the men in US prisons African American, John Henry's likely truth has incredible power today. The myth is far more appealing but it is a lie. John Henry was not a working class hero, he is the hero of the powerless and poor - which is still the greatest overlooked segment of American society today. Like much of the American middle class and poor, he is a symbol of all that is wrong with this country. Celebrate him for who he hoped to be, and for those who worked by his side and shared his sorrow. But do not give me John Henry as an American folk hero anymore. He is a truth that we all need to recognize - he is the America we all keep trying to deny.

Nelson also has an adult title on John Henry: Steel Drivin' Man. In his afterword to the children's title, he explains that he continues his research into the men who built the railroad.

[Post pic of the John Henry postage stamp and the statue near Big Bend.]

By an odd coincidence I had just finished reading Once a Wolf by Stephen Swinburne to my son when I received Etienne Delessert's picture Big and Bad. Once a Wolf is part of the Scientists in the Field series, an absolutely superb collection of books that I can not recommend enough; we have yet to be disappointed by a single one of these titles. In this case, Swinburne writes about the history of wolves in Europe and the Lower 48 and the successful efforts to return the Gray Wolf to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. It's a fascinating look at wildlife management and a thorough examination of the relationship between predator and prey species. Swinburne brought up a couple of things that really stayed with me, particularly when he wrote about wolves and people in Europe:

England hated wolves from the country's beginning. King Edward who ruled in the tenth century, allowed citizens to pay their taxes in wolf heads. Around 1500, entire forests were burned to destroy wolves. To protect livestock, laws aimed at exterminating these creatures were passed. The last wolf in Scotland was killed in 1743. All of Ireland's wolves were destroyed by 1776.

Few wolves remain in Europe today.

Swinburne cites "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Three Little Pigs" and Robert Browning's "Ivan Ivanovitch" as literary sources of humanity's fear of wolves. "What is not useful is vicious" said Cotton Mather and with lurid stories of blood thirsty creatures filling their heads, the American colonists set after them with a vengeance. Through poisoning of animal carcasses and hunting, wolves were pushed out of the Lower 48. By the 20th century they were nearly gone and in 1926, Yellowstone was officially free of them. Finally, westerners felt safe.

The question of course, is why wolves had to die for cattle to live. That is where Delessert's book suddenly came into play.

In this beautifully illustrated retelling of the famous tale, wolf is "lean, mean, and always hungry". His arrival in the woods is terrifying, as "when wolf wasn't hunting he was making splendid hats with the fur of animals he had gobbled down. His head was so large that he needed the skin of seven cats to cover it." It is not only the pigs who are his target, but every single animal in the woods. They end up banding together to come up with a plan to deal with the monster and ultimately they lure him down a chimney into a blazing fire. "With a most horrible wail, the burning Wolf shot out into the evening skies. You can still see Wolf circling around the earth as bright as a shooting star." And all the animals are shown lined up in a row looking up at the blazing wolf, happy to see him gone.

There is no redemption for Wolf in Big and Bad, but there isn't supposed to be. The wolf is the enemy; he has always been the enemy, and we count on the pigs and Red Riding Hood and everyone else he meets to outsmart him and bring about his death. What I never thought about until reading these two books together was just what the societal impact of this long held tradition of wolf bashing has done to the way we treat the actual animal. It took 80 years to get the Gray Wolf back into Yellowstone but that happy ending, the way Once a Wolf ends, is not the situation today. The Gray Wolf was just delisted from the endangered species list and can now be hunted when it strays off park land. The numbers, we have decided, must be reduced. The wolf is causing problems yet again and this time it is not only the Gray Wolf, but the Mexican Wolf in the American Southwest as well:

"I'd really like to see them gone," said Barbara Marks, who chairs the Arizona Cattle Growers' Association's wildlife committee and operates a cattle ranch with her husband that includes 225 acres of private property and 71,775 acres of public land. "In the middle of the night you wake up in a cold sweat when you hear your dogs barking, wondering if something's wrong."

In Alaska, where Gray Wolves were never endangered, there has been a long fought continuous battle to control the animal. It is only in recent years that aerial hunting of wolves was made illegal without a permit yet recently there has been a call to obtain permission for Native hunters to kill cubs in their dens. Every time the moose population decreases in an area the first direction some people will look to is wolves. Historically wolves are considered a problem species, first and foremost and changing that impression has proven to be nearly impossible.

It makes you rethink Red Riding Hood all over again, doesn't it?

We grow up on certain stories and we happily tell them to our children and we never think - for a minute - that these stories mean anything more than the passing of a cultural landmark. Cinderella, Snow white, Hansel and Gretal, and on and on, are common around the world in one way or another. Riding Hood and the Three Pigs are no different, nor should they be. But it is clear from our continued struggle with wolf management that these simple old fashioned stories and others like them have created long standing and dangerous myths about one animal in particular. Stories have damaged the survival of wolves in the wild; they have made us unreasonably scared in our beds. They have made us hate the real animals who never asked to be part of our colorful picture books. We have created a myth and allowed it to flourish for our own amusement and it is wolves who pay the price, simply because they are wolves.

The Idaho Legislature last month set a $9.75 fee to hunt wolves. In January, Republican Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter vowed, "I'm prepared to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself."

This is the week—some 42 years ago—that I became an American citizen. I was remembering the day fondly, and decided to make a poetry connection. I was 10 years old and my German-born parents were becoming naturalized citizens, so I was, too. I remember getting out of school, going to the Dallas courthouse, the seriousness and the celebration, and the chocolate milk shake that followed. What a day! A few years later, as a teenager, I helped my Oma (grandmother) master enough American history in broken English to pass the questions that were asked of her as she became an American citizen, too. This is the little old lady who stood up to Hitler and was a German refugee fleeing with five children and an elderly mother in tow. I am still touched when I see swearing in ceremonies and look at all the different faces that are proud to call the United States home. I know it may seem corny, but this is very real in my family.

And there are many poets who have written about their feelings about this country, both good and bad. Maybe that’s why I love Langston Hughes and his “I, too am America” poem—although I recognize a very different struggle there. Or why I relate to Janet Wong’s poem, “Speak up” about kids taunting a child who speaks another language. Many Latino/Latina poets have addressed this issue of immigration, language difference, and cultural assimilation in their work, including Pat Mora, Gary Soto, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Francisco X. Alarcón. One poetry collection that really speaks to me on this issue is Monica Gunning’s America, My New Home (San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book Press, 2004). Although Gunning is my mother’s age, and comes from Jamaica not Germany, her poems speak with wonder about the contrasts between her old home and new home, and about the challenges in straddling old ways and new, in ways that echo my own experiences and emotions. Across cultures, there are still children for whom “home” is a very real question, whose families talk seriously about loyalty and identity, and who walk the tightrope of keeping family traditions while being “real” Americans.

I looked for the perfect poem to share and decided to try an experiment. My 19 year old son has been educating me about “mashups,” a new trend in music to blend parts of many different songs into one. It’s led to interesting discussions between us about artistic freedom and copyright infringement, but it has also prompted me to think about what that might look and feel like in other arts—like poetry. So, with all due respect to two fantastic poets, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman, here is a “mashup” of two of their poems meshed into one: “I, Too” and “I Hear America Singing.”

I, too, sing America.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear;

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, sing America.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear;
Those of mechanics—each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work;
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat—the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck;
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench—the hatter singing as he stands;
The wood-cutter’s song—the ploughboy’s, on his way in the morning, or at the noon intermission, or at sundown;
The delicious singing of the mother—or of the young wife at work—or of the girl sewing or washing—Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else;
The day what belongs to the day—At night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs.

I, too, am America.


Thank you, Langston and Walt. Langston’s words are in brown and Walt’s are in green. FYI. What do you think? Is this poetry sacrilege? Or new and innovative? I’m not sure…

Join the rest of the Poetry Friday Round Up at The Simple and The Ordinary.

Picture credit: Me at 5, attending kindergarten in Germany

Today is Langston Hughes birthday, Feb. 1, 1902. Boy, I love this man’s poetry. It speaks to me on so many levels and resonates with readers and listeners of all ages and cultures. His collection, The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, is a staple of my poetry library and I refer to it often. (I chose it as one of “Fifteen Classics of Contemporary Poetry for Children” in my Book Links article in 2006; 15, (6), 12-15.) In fact, it was just reissued in a 75th anniversary edition (as I noted Dec. 31, 2007, in My favorite poetry books of 2007.) As I pored over previous blog postings to be sure I didn’t repeat myself, I realized that I refer to Hughes and his work often!

I wrote about his moving “Poem” (I loved my friend./He went away from me) last Sept. 21, 2007, and mentioned his work in my July 24, 2006 posting on “Multicultural Poetry” and my April 14, 2007 posting on Dream Day and my April 17, 2007 posting on the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Last year (Jan. 24), we celebrated Coretta Scott King Illustrator honors for Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes edited by David Roessel and Arnold Rampersad, illustrated by Benny Andrews (published by Sterling Publishing) and also highlighted Carol of the Brown King: Nativity Poems illustrated by Ashley Bryan (Dec. 22, 2006).

So, for a change, I’d like to pay tribute to Hughes’s life and work with a poem by someone else—Walter Dean Myers, a man who clearly stands on Langston Hughes’s shoulders. This poem is in the voice of a Harlem salesman and comes from Myers’s amazing multi-voiced photo-illustrated, Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices (Holiday House, 2004).

Jesse Craig, 38
Salesman
by Walter Dean Myers

I knew Langston
Laughed with the man

In West Harlem
With me thinking

This is no Keats
No fair Shelley

This is Negro
Quintessential

Rice and collards
Down-home brother

He knew rivers
And rent-due blues

And what it meant
To poet Black

The Academy of American Poets is rich with additional information about Hughes and his work, including teaching resources and sample poems. There’s a wonderful audio clip from “The Voice of Langston Hughes” (by Folkways Records) of his reading of his poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” written in 1920, just after he graduated from high school! Additional audio (and more) can be found at the Langston Hughes Young Writers Project, including poems with musical accompaniment or translated into Spanish!

Thanks to Karen Edmisten for this week's Poetry Friday Round Up.

P.S. New: I’m honored to be linked to the Web site of Book Links as one of their new “Featured Blogs.”

Picture credit: concise.britannica.com

I had the opportunity to meet the talented and effervescent author and illustrator Grace Lin this spring when we were on a panel together at the Texas Library Association conference. Her husband, Robert Mercer, was desperately ill and sadly passed away a month ago at the too-young age of 35. My good friend Nancy also lost her husband to cancer this summer. Grief has been weighing on many I care about recently, so I sought a poem for solace, of course.


Poem
by Langston Hughes

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.

Hughes, Langston. 1994. The Dreamkeeper and Other Poems. New York: Knopf, p. 12.

I would also like to join in the promotion of Robert’s Snow: For Cancer’s Cure, the fundraising effort that Grace initiated several years ago. From the Web site: “Own a piece of art from your favorite children's book illustrator while helping to fight cancer” by buying an original snowflake ornament created by children’s book illustrators. “Since 2004, this online auction has raised over $200,000 for Dana-Farber, and with your help, we can continue this holiday tradition in 2007.” The auction begins in November. And for more information about Robert himself, check out the Blue Rose Girls blog.

For the whole Poetry Friday roundup, go to Sara Lewis Holmes' blog Read Write Believe.

Picture credit: http://bluerosegirls.blogspot.com/