Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Tuesday, February 9th, 2021.

Today's poem is by James Mercer, Langston Hughes, also known as Langston Hughes. He was born February 1st,

1901, and so earlier this month would have been the 120th birthday, the 120th anniversary of his birth. And then he

died on May 22nd, 1967. He was, of course, one of the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called The Negro Speaks of Rivers, and it's one of the

most important poems of Langston Hughes's canon.

And I'm going to share some thoughts about that poem from a book that I helped work on 30 poems to memorize before it's too late.

In particular, an essay on this particular poem by Christine Perron.

The essay is called The Slow Accretion of Experience. So what I'll do

is I'll read the poem and then I will share a few thoughts from Christine Perrin's essay on this poem

and then I'll read it one more time. If you were a long-time listener of this podcast, you would

remember, I think I read this a couple of years ago, but given that it's Black History Month

and that we just had the,

would have just celebrated Langston Hughes' birthday on the first of February.

I wanted to read it again.

Hughes was a Missouri-born poet who made his name while living in New York City.

He was an innovator of jazz poetry and incorporated syncopation and repetition into traditional verse forms,

thus mirroring the improvisational nature of jazz and blues music.

As David Littlejohn wrote, quote, by molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk,

the rhythms of Negro music by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense

and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable

newness distinctly his own, end quote. And that's from David Little Jones' essay on Langston Hughes.

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