One Way To Look at Poetry -- and the Lyrics for an Aria

 The Nov. 11, 2020 New York Times has a review of "African American Poetry," as compiled by Kevin Young, currently poetry editor at The New Yorker and soon to become director of the Smithsonian's African American Museum in Washington D.C.  At present, Young also heads the New York Public Library's research center on Black culture.

Young's new anthology, at about 1,110 pages, is a roundup of poetry by African Americans over the past 250 years and, among other things, attempts to save some Black poets from obscurity.

The Times review, by Parul Sehgal, was very positive. Among other things, he said, it reads like a form of history.

What jumped out at me, however, was what might be viewed as a definition of poetry by Sehgal. To wit: "Whatever the style, whatever the shape of the vessel, the particular holding power of the poem is clear. More efficiently than almost any other form, a poem can convey a feeling of simultaneity; the past can saturate the present, the future can rear up behind us, a mood can tip between lament and praise song."

I am far from an expert on poetry -- in fact quite the reverse -- but that definition rang some bells for me because I have been attempting to write the libretto for an operetta that would be done in a neo-Baroque style. Among other things, that involves writing lyrics, generally in rhyme, for individual songs, or arias. This is in contrast to most contemporary operas which generally employ continuous music with voices coming in and out, albeit sometimes for extended periods, but generally not singing anything that can stand alone as "a song."

In the Baroque style, which emphasizes the vocal capabilities of singers first and foremost, the lyrics need to be kept very short. That means packing as much meaning or as many ideas as possible into very few words to achieve a result somewhat similar to that described by Shegal above.

Readers interested in the operetta project can check out this page on my author's website.

Black Writers Make Progress Despite "Systemic Racism"

 We've heard a lot in recent months about how the U.S. is fundamentally defined by "systemic racism" -- in other words, discrimination against non-white citizens, and especially Blacks, is baked in the cake because the country was established on that very basis despite certain idealistic postulates.

Thus, one branch of this theory goes, reform of existing institutions can't, by definition, produce equality and justice. Absent a major transfer of power, Blacks in particular can't get anywhere.

In the face of such arguments, I've been trying to see if there might be a counter-narrative, at least in the arts. Could it be that things aren't quite as bad as it is currently fashionable to depict them?

The Nov. 9, 2020, Arts section of the New York Times  has an item about a woman, who somewhat against the tide, writes short stories and is just having her second collection, "The Office of Historical Corrections" published. Replete with a photo of the author, Danielle Evans, the piece was awarded two thirds of a page.  Not bad publicity!

Ms Evans is Black and what interested me was what she had to say about that. In a nutshell, while there is still room for improvement on one front or another, a lot of progress has been made.

Asked how things have changed, Ms Evans had the following to say:

"I'm less afraid that I'll be the only Black writer that somebody reads or that there will be only one book by a writer of color each season that people are talking about. It's much more true now that you'll hear, 'Here are eight books by Black writers. Let's think about what they are saying to each other.'"

While that's good news for those unwilling to throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to making America a better society, it's also good news for Ms Evans as a writer. It gives her, she said, more freedom to write about riskier, weirder material because she doesn't have to worry about being taken as representative of her race.

Where is change still needed?  In Evans view, white writers need to talk more about race and Black writers should be asked to review books written by whites, in part to point out what's missing there. 

"People of color notice absences, we notice the treatment of secondary characters, where the language gets weird. And that's useful for everybody."

There was a time -- well, it seems very naive now -- when the notion of where thing ought to go was "integration." The concept was that if discriminatory barriers could be broken down, we could all be the same despite differing skin colors, religions, whatever. Well, not anymore. Racial differences need to be noted, acknowledged in a positive fashion, explored, understood and valued.

Here's Evan's take on that when it comes to literature:

"We should be talking about race more as a function of craft -- of everybody's craft. Maybe it shouldn't be the first paragraph of every review, but it should be noted that books have a racial context. Conversations would be more interesting for it. Part of the answer is making that conversation more visible in more places, so it doesn't feel hyper-visible  when it's focused on the work of Black writers."

Moving away from race and onto the state of literary fiction, Evans believes it has a future despite many claims to the contrary.

"If I put the right story in someone's hands, it can change their life," she said. In that context, she pointed in particular to Toni Morrison's 1992 novel "Jazz."