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AL FILREIS:
I'm Al Filreis and this is Poem Talk at the Writer's House, where I have the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of contemporary poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close, but not too close reading of a poem. We'll talk, may even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities and, we hope, gain for a poem that interests us, some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound archive writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today, I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writer's House and our Wexler Studio by Herman Beavers, scholar, critic, teacher, poet, whose most recent poems have appeared in Miles, the Langston Hughes Colloquy Verses Philadelphia, whose PennSound page I highly recommend for remarkable performances of his poems, who teaches among other things of course on the literatures of jazz both undergrad and graduate chair of Africana studies here at Penn. Whose new book is titled, 'To Put Things in Order: Geography and the Political Imaginary in TonI Morrison's Fiction.' And who is, I'm pleased to say, a longtime friend. I almost said longtime friend of the Writer's House, truly and indeed a member of the Writer's House advisory board and by Christopher Mustazza, a scholar whose work focuses on the beginnings of the poetry audio archive and who has edited several collections of poetry audio for PennSound, including collections of Vachel Lindsay, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Harriet Monroe, and Edgar Lee Masters, who's writing has appeared or will appear in oral tradition, Chicago Review, Jacket2, Empty Mirror, The Volta Blog, recipient of a grant from Harvard University's Woodbury Poetry Room to work on a book-length project called The Birth of the American Poetry Archive. And by Salamishah Tillett, who teaches English and Africana studies here at Penn, who has published Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination, and is currently finishing a book on Nina Simone.

How far along are you? Oh, I shouldn't ask that question.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
I mean, I feel confident that I'm farther along, then. I'm excited.

AL FILREIS:
It's really exciting. So, finishing a book on Nina Simone and who has appeared on among other venues, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and elsewhere. And has published editorials for the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, and wrote the liner notes for the John Legend and the Roots album ‘Wake Up,' you'll never not have me say that. That’s so cool. Did that win a Grammy?

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Not the liner notes...

AL FILREIS:
Not the liner notes, but the album did.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
The album did.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, and who is co-founder of A Long Walk Home Incorporated, a non-profit organization that uses art to end violence against girls and women? Salamishah, welcome back.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Oh, thank you.

AL FILREIS:
To Poem Talk at the Writer's House.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
I'm excited to be here. Thank you.

AL FILREIS:
Been a little off a little bit, so... But you're not rusty. I'm sure I can already tell. And Chris, you are at the Writer's House all the time but I think this is your first time in front of the mic on Poem Talk.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Yeah. It's exciting to be here.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, I'm really glad of it. Welcome. And Herm, always good to see you.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Good to be here Al.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you all. So, we're here today to talk about a poem by James Weldon Johnson. It's called 'O Southland,' and a rare recording of Johnson performing that poem comes along with this discussion. The poem was published in the Independent in 1907, and again in W.E.B. Du Bois's magazine Horizon in 1908. And probably most people first encountered it contemporaneously that is in Johnson's book, 50 years in other poems of 1917 and especially in the very famous 1922 anthology, 'The Book of American Negro Poetry,' which was edited by Johnson himself. The recording has long been trapped. I think that's the right word. Trapped on aluminum platters at Columbia University, in the archive at Columbia and also trapped in a reel dub that was made by the Library of Congress in the 1970s. And the original recording was produced by George Hibbett and W Cabell Greet, lexicographers and scholars of American dialect. I have to pause the very fact that scholars of American dialect are giving us a poem that where dialect may or may not be a relevant matter.

But anyway, nonetheless, lexicographers and scholars of American dialect, Hibbett and Cabell Greet at Columbia University, they did this recording on December 24, 1935 and our own Chris Mastazza, who's here digitized the entire recording of 15 poems and is the editor of PennSound’s James Weldon Johnson page. So, here now is James Weldon Johnson himself performing 'O, Southland.' (AUDIO PLAYS)

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON:
O Southland! O Southland!

Have you not heard the call,

The trumpet blown, the word made known

To the nations, one and all?

The watchword, the hope-word,

Salvation's present plan?

A gospel new, for all—for you:

Man shall be saved by man.

O Southland! O Southland!

Do you not hear to-day

The mighty beat of onward feet,

And know you not their way?

'Tis forward, 'tis upward,

On to the fair white arch

Of Freedom's dome, and there is room

For each man who would march.

O Southland, fair Southland!

Then why do you still cling

To an idle age and a musty page,

To a dead and useless thing?

'Tis springtime! 'Tis work-time!

The world is young again!

And God's above, and God is love,

And men are only men.

AL FILREIS:
So, who's ‘you’ here? Who's being addressed? Second line is the first instance of it. Have you not heard the call? Herm, can you take a crack at that?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
I read it as white Southerners who are wedded to the past and by virtue of that deaf to the present hubbub of change. And I mean it's an early poem. It's 1907. So, it's interesting because I don't think that the poem is aimed at a particular person, though in 1907 you certainly could or would have known of somebody that's a vehement, segregationist who would've been in public discourse. Maybe it's Woodrow Wilson.

AL FILREIS:
Interesting. Salamishah, do you have anything to add to that? And I'll just throw in the whole question of you being people. I think Herm saying a people, some kind of identity but then Southland is the you know, metonymic stand-in. So, people are being referred to as a region. I guess, how do you translate Southland and what do you do with ‘you’?

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
I mean, I guess to follow up to what Herman was saying, I mean I think is interesting 'cause I'm coming to this poem really fresh. Meaning I'm not as familiar with it as everyone else is. What's fascinating to me is the move between the geographic specificity of the south and then pulling backwards to think about the larger American landscape. And so, on one hand we think about you know, we think about the past and we think about both slavery and segregation, it being a kind of anomalous structure that we tie it to the south specifically. But I think what Johnson is doing here is moving in and out of the south to the larger American landscape. That's the Southland becomes America, right? The south is not anomalous, but it is the stand in for the larger nation. And so, while he's summoning his brothers and sisters in the south to be different, he's really calling the nation to rise up to the occasion and hear the call of democracy or freedom.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you. Chris, anything to add to the address?

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Yeah, I agree with that especially the part about being both like inside and outside the south. Johnson is from Jacksonville Florida and he has this really fraught relationship with the South where he's from there, he sees it as like his origins but he had very traumatic experiences there. And he later moves to the north and you actually see in books like 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,' is actually that's one of the kind of themes is wanting to return to the South, but feeling both at home and estranged at the same time.

AL FILREIS:
Herm, how perfect is the meter? I see that you've done some scanning on your notes page. It's pretty close to perfect.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
No, actually it's not unless I'm... And I read it out loud several times. There are a bunch of inverted meters in the poem. There are a bunch of triple meters in the poems. I find an amphibrachic line, I find a dactylic line. He's got some really interesting things going on with rhythm in this poem. There are lines that are heavily stressed. So, line five, 'the watchword, the hope-word,' I mean there's more stresses than unstressed syllables in that line. And so...

AL FILREIS:
So, he's keeping regularly to that, I believe Herm so that we get his forward, his upward doing the same.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
In the next stanza.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
So, he's got some kind of regularity going.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Yeah, he'll pull back into an iambic from time to time. So, it seems to me that maybe every fourth line of the stanza, he'll revert back to the iambic meter.

AL FILREIS:
Can we push a little harder on this to any of you and just I mean Southland is the key term here. One of the key terms, let's just say the key term. And it goes against dynamic. So, I mean and I take the iamb to represent poetic and other regularity and conventionality and Southland goes against it constantly. Am I overreading to see meter trying to slow us down from doing the regular conventional thing? I mean, the politics of meter may be always pushing It.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
I guess I have a question, and if that's true, then how does that...

AL FILREIS:
Thank you for the if too, because I don't know.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
No. Well, if it's true that it's slowing us down and yet the narrative of the content of the phrasing is all about a kind of inevitability of time or progress or racial equality always being on the horizon but coming soon, what is that? What do we do with that juxtaposition between sort of meter and content here? Just...

HERMAN BEAVERS:
You know I would, I think that's a great point. And what I would add to that is the unusual meters in this poem mean that anything that you think you might be able to anticipate about what's gonna happen in the South are undercut by the metrical shifts in the poem.

AL FILREIS:
How about the tone, anybody? it's been described every you know, if you Google 'O Southland,' you get sort of high school crib notes kinds of sites, which say this is a remarkably positive upbeat poem. And I don't know if that's miseducation, if students are being taught that because it also seems there's an inexorable marching and you really ought to come along with it, or you're gonna get marched on top of do. Is that in there? Do we all agree there's some undertone there?

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
'The mighty beat of onward feet.'

AL FILREIS:
And of course there's the meter again.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Well, you know there's also an echo of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in that line. The last verse of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” talks about marching and feet.

AL FILREIS:
Let's just do the footnote here for listeners: so that poem turned into an anthem. Salamishah, anything to add about It?

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Yeah, I mean it's a song that... Well, James Weldon Johnson and Rosamond Johnson brothers. James Weldon wrote the lyrics and Rosamond wrote the musical composition. And so, it's a song that become an anthem throughout the 20th century and 21st century. And what's interesting about this in relationship to that and Imani Perry has written or was writing a book about this is thinking about James Weldon Johnson as a kind of bridge figure, right? So, her book is thinking about how that song lifter voice and sing cuts across ideological divides. And when I was doing research on 'O Southland', what was fascinating to me was that you know, as you said Du Bois published it but that Booker T. Washington sends Johnson a letter and he says, usually Negro poetry or black poetry is incorrigible. But this is actually a good poem. So, you have someone like Washington and Du Bois, who are at odds with each other in many ways by this point, 1907, 1908 actually coming together around this poem. And so, there's something about Johnson and his work that speaks to multiple black audiences as well as to the larger nation.

AL FILREIS:
Can we pause and say more about that? So, the poem either is consciously or incidentally negotiating on race, politics and ideological spectrum, Washington and Du Bois in this instance. So, how does it negotiate it? And is it part of a plan, do you think Herm?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Well, I think listening to Johnson read it and at one point he rolls Rs in the poem and there's a speech that Booker T. Washington gives, that he does pretty much the same thing. And so, one of the things that strikes me about hearing the poem is Johnson's really formal delivery of the poem. I mean he could be Vachel Lindsay.

AL FILREIS:
Almo... Not quite (LAUGHS).

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Not quite.

AL FILREIS:
But about the same time Lindsay walked into the studio and did the real rolling Rs. This is a good time for us to turn to Chris. Chris just you could have a whole hour talking about what it was like to discover these recordings. But can you say a little something about the situation for the recording? He was just a year or two before his death. He was an old guy.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Yeah, and he was recorded in a lab meant for the recording of dialect samples for ethnographic study. And so, it's just so interesting considering Johnson's really difficult relationship with dialect poems in this particular collection in 50 years and other poems. There are like a section of dialect poems, and they're a section of poems in the so-called standard English.

AL FILREIS:
He read 15 poems on that occasion. Were any of them dialect poems?

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Yes. I think about a third of them or were dialect poems. Some from this collection here.

AL FILREIS:
But Hibbett and Greet didn't stop him when he did this poem and say no, we want dialect poems. And what is the complexity? Two questions.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Sure.

AL FILREIS:
What is the complexity about their hope to have good dialect stuff? And then he comes in and does something that's really high poetic and tentorium.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Right, I write about this a little bit in what I hope will be my dissertation eventually in....

AL FILREIS:
Is that a plug?

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Buy my dissertation.

AL FILREIS:
I don't think buy is an issue you got you know, Chris, we need to explain to you about buy is not the thing.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
But Greet and Hibbett are what we would think of today as prescriptivist, that they believe that there is a right way to speak. They do a study looking for the correct you know, US dialect. And so, I think it's just so interesting that they record Johnson and he does poems in dialect and in standard English.

AL FILREIS:
Well, while you have the mic on this, and this is a little bit of a digression but I promise we'll get back. So, they were on aluminum platters.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
And years later they were dubbed just I guess out of the concern that they'd be degraded.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
And then the dub sat there doing nothing at the Library of Congress.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Degrading, yeah.

AL FILREIS:
Right, degrading cause the dub was on reel to reel. And that stuff degrades faster than the aluminum, I would think.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
So, can you without damning institutions too much on the radio here?

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Sure.

AL FILREIS:
Why did it sit there? This is James Weldon Johnson.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Well, you know the overall archive is huge. And it's not just poetry. Poetry is really the smallest part of the archive. Most of it is hundreds of dialect samples, recordings off the radio, presidential speeches and so unless you really know what you're looking at. I mean, you know there are big poets and there it's Eliot and Frost. And that people would notice if they saw this but unless you really took the time to look. This could just look like a collection of dialect recordings from the thirties.

AL FILREIS:
Herman and Salamishah let's get back to the poem. And now a few stanzas in it starts to get a little edgier. Why do you still cling? That's pretty, that's a real confrontation to the fair Southland. So, Salamishah should help us with this part of the poem. Say anything please.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
I know Herman is also gonna talk about this, but for me one of the things I'm steeping the mindset of Nina Simone's 'Mississippi Goddam.' Which is also makes me steep in the mindset of King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And so, there's a lot of resonance for me with those later works and this particularly around this idea of individuals or communities or a nation clinging to some old way of being and yet again, this ‘onward feet' that's in the earlier stanza or the inevitability of racial progress and racial equality and that there's something happening in the nation and that to cling to this old, I love this idle age and musty page. It's a really very literary but also you know, marking a specific moment in time and marking these people as dead and useless. I mean there's so much that he's arguing here and saying... What's fascinating though is when you get to the later periods in ‘63 and ‘64 when King and Simone are writing their pieces, you actually know that the civil rights movement is happening.

We read those other pieces as both apocalyptic and prophetic. How do we read Johnson knowing what we now know doesn't happen during this time.

AL FILREIS:
And for us it's inevitable to read it that way of course.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
So, Herman I think it's a little confusing or complicated if the musty page is the thing being clung to and that it's dead and useless. And yet the poem idiom here is traditional. So, who's clinging to what and what's dead and useless?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Well, you know, I want to reiterate Salamishah's point about the poem being prophetic, cause when I read this poem, I was really struck by how closely it describes what exactly is gonna happen in the civil rights movement. So, it speaks to the marching, it speaks to the south's resistance, to the change. It speaks to the manner in which Kings ‘I've been to the mountaintop’ speech at the march on Washington is really about re revivifying the US and particularly the South. So, I wanna say that this poem... I think the term that I would use is an evangelical poem. It's about trying to convert somebody that's resistant to the idea that they need to change their life. And so, that idle age and musty page is literally Johnson imagining this textual representation of the South's resistance to change.

AL FILREIS:
Interesting.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
But what is the musty page?

AL FILREIS:
Well, I wanna get back to that cause he sort of evaded the question a little bit. But I wanna roll with what for a second with what Herman said, this idea that it’s work time. So, there's a lot of bad stuff going on but it's springtime and it's time to work and we need to renew. Cause that's what poetry and....

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right,

AL FILREIS:
And somatic rhetoric does. It's the vernal of vernal hope. So, I'm really persuaded by that. OK, but so now I want to go back to the musty page because it can't be the musty page of the relevant amendments because we want those words to glow and live. And it can't be, I guess it could be musty page of post reconstruction, Jim Crow local legislation. Is that it? It's already musty. Because it would seem fresh and aggressive and new. I'm a little confused by musty page.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Well think about though the Souths and when things here of the agrarian, this is low.

AL FILREIS:
This is well before the Agrarians, yeah.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
But think about that sort of adherence to the idea of the South as a pastoral, space.

AL FILREIS:
And a literary tradition

HERMAN BEAVERS:
And a literary tradition, right. And in that respect there's sort of adherence to classical models of how to represent...

AL FILREIS:
Idle age.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
The South, right. Idle age (INAUDIBLE). That's it. Allen Tate, 'Ode to the Confederate Dead.' It's about that medieval chivalric romantic South. And Faulkner indulged in that a little bit too, didn't he? So, that might be it.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
I was just gonna say also you could think of the musty page as a sort of visual foil to the oral AU or AL threads that run through the poem. Like when you see things like, have you not heard the call? Do you not hear today? And so, it's like the performed is sort of like the live and the current where things are going. And the printed word I is static and musty and the thing that's of the past.

AL FILREIS:
Salamishah your thoughts at this point. How are we doing with this poem? Do you feel like we've figured it out?

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Well, one of my favorite lines is 'o Southland, my Southland, o birth land.' Right. So, the move from o to my to o Southland to birth land and just moving in and out. And it reminds me just because we're thinking about Johnson in a kind a long tradition of African-American letters you know, when Douglass's title of his memoir you know, Narrative of Frederick Douglass Comma an American slave, the ways in which African-American writers are always both claiming the nation at the same time that they're rebuking it, right? And so this move from o to my, I think is where the optimism of the poem comes from or at least we hear it there. But yeah, I mean I think we're doing a good job.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you, John...

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
(LAUGHS)

AL FILREIS:
No, I think we're. Johnson did not read in the recording the final stanza. After I ask Chris why I'd like to ask Salamishah to read it. So, it gets into the record, if you don't mind. And then I want to ask you about remember, remember or ask anybody about remember, remember. Chris, any reason why they would've cut that off?

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Well, the rec...

AL FILREIS:
Or did you miss it when you trans… when you...

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
No, I...

AL FILREIS:
Downloaded the...

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
I hope not. That poem was one of about four or five on one side of a record that couldn't really hold that much information on the side. I think the side can maybe hold eight minutes or something like that. And so, it's possible that they truncated the poem to be able to fit more on less media. But that said, I actually think it's a really interesting place to end the poem because that line there, 'and men are only men,’ I felt like pulls hard against the end of the first stanza of ‘men shall be saved by men.' So, like, the ladder seemed sort of like you know, reductive in a way. It's kind of saying you know men are men, what are you gonna do? And then the earlier one is a sort of like a pivot away from the divine to humanism to say like we're gonna put our faith in our fellow people, not in a sort of divine providence.

AL FILREIS:
Good job, reading what might have been an accident or some horrible editorial decision. Salamishah OK, reading this?

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Sure.

AL FILREIS:
Without any preparation.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Sure.

O Southland! My Southland!

O birthland! Do not shirk

This toilsome task ,nor respite ask

But gird you for the work.

Remember, remember,

That weakness stalks in pride;

That he is strong who helps along

The faint one at his side.

AL FILREIS:
Herm, can we do something with remember, remember, did it strike you as hard as it struck me?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Well, I read it as ironic given that the South is sort of locked into a perpetual nostalgia. So, when he says, 'remember, remember,' it's almost as if he's signifying on the south 'cause he's basically saying your previous acts of remembering have been sort of tied to illegitimate, illicit actually damaging to the democracy sort of memories. And remember, remember: it's a call to the South humanity is how I would read that.

AL FILREIS:
So, that weakness stalks in pride, that's what we need to remember. What does somebody wanna translate or paraphrase that we remember that weakness stalks in pride stalks? Seems like an odd word choice.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Well I mean, I guess the other way we could do this is thinking about that you brought up the kind of chivalry that Johnson's pulling on or banking on in some ways. And so, by pointing out that this kind of reliance on this old order is actually weakness, right? And so, and that weakness being grounded in a kind of Southern pride or chivalry relationship to identity and gender, but also to the past is at its heart what's going to undo the south. And so, I'm really fascinated by the next line that, 'he is strong who helps along the faint one at his side.' So, faint meaning who's the faint one? Is the faint one you know a way of describing color, right? Or is faint...

AL FILREIS:
Disempowerment.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Disempowerment, but who is that? Is it because it's another thing that's going on here is that, he is playing on this idea, this kind of plantation nostalgia that you talked about in which you know, subjected African Americans are seen as weaker and therefore needing Southern plantation holders to take care of them. They would be the ones who are in power and the viral ones. But here he's doing so much like he's pointing out you know, actually virility is tied to those who are part of American progress, not to those who are subjugating it.

AL FILREIS:
Right.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
I'm really glad that you went there 'cause one of the things that I thought with that word stalks is, it echoes the way that post reconstruction black men get described as these animals that stalk white women. So, it's a really interesting rhetorical inversion because what's at the end of that line is pride. And part of what is going on with the whole transaction around how you construct black men in the years after reconstruction is masculine anxiety. And so, the whole idea of helping the faint along, I think is how it goes, right? Is again an interesting inversion because it's actually black people who are the strong ones, not white people.

AL FILREIS:
In both the racist imaginary.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
But also in the hopeful futuristic vision.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
So, you are all pointing to extremely deft and complex and mixed political strategy on race politics. I mean, it is really complicated because it's doing a bunch of things at once. So, let's go around and very briefly just point again, you may have already said this, just point again to the strategy, to the logic, to the argumentative logic so that it's really clear to us just anywhere.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Well, I mean I think that Johnson as we were talking about before kind of is both speaking from within and from outside of the South. And I think it's kind of like this sort of like pointed like I want you to come along and come to the right place, but like I'm not gonna let you off the hook for what you're doing, and kind of digging into a recalcitrant stance like that last paragraph. I would say that weakness stalks in pride is kind of speaking to people who think that an obstinate grasp on the past is a sort of a form of strength. And he's saying that's not strength. What to be strong means to move with into the present moment.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
I do think that we could think of the first stanza and when he says 'have you not heard the call, the trumpet blown the word made known to nations one and all.' So, I think while this seems to be a poem relegated to the South or relegated to the United States, he's also anticipating or at least understanding the way in which America both has this like, the trumpet blown, you know, reminds me obviously of like you know, declaration of independence. We're thinking about American freedom at its best at as a, an experiment and as a project, but also that the world is watching the nation. And it's stuff that you kind of think happens later on. Like you think of it as post World War II or when United States emerges as a superpower. But Johnson is clearly saying here that there is the political strategy that he's deploying is appealing to America on so many different levels to rise up to its clarion call of American democracy. The world is watching and it's also the thing that will save the nation at itself.

I mean, it's an interesting move between the domestic and...

AL FILREIS:
That's really great. The world is watching that would... Or the world is reading a musty page and ought to read something new. But also the world is listening. And yet if you're listening and you can't hear this poem with its own trumpet, then you're not really reading this poem. I think of McKay's, 'If We Must Die.'

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
Which is a you know, a more threatening and angry and revolutionary poem overtly. But what it does is it delivers a sonnet as a kind of trojan horse.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
And this delivers this extraordinary perfect high poetic verse as a clarion call, as a trumpet. And it says, 'go ahead, tell me you can't hear it.'

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Well, what interests me is the next to last line of every stanza. So, what I have, 'cause I took this out of St. Peter, relates an incident and it cuts off that last stanza but...

AL FILREIS:
It does.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
It does.

AL FILREIS:
So, this is another volume by Johnson.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right, another volume by Johnson cuts off.

AL FILREIS:
The penguin reprint.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right, cuts off the last stanza.

AL FILREIS:
Oh, Interesting.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
So, a gospel new for all for you, a freedom's dome and there is room and God's above and God is love. So, a couple things. One in two of the three lines, there's internal rhyme but two a gospel new for all dash for you. One of the things that is so clear in the language is that this is inclusive. If this is a new gospel, you can if you choose to hear it, be part of that gospel. A freedom's dome and there is room. I mean, part of what he's saying is, this is not an exclusive moment. If you want to get on the train, you can get on the train and God's above and God is love. Part of what he's saying is this is not an Old Testament God that's gonna punish you for being stiff-necked. (AUDIO PLAYS)

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON:
O Southland! O Southland! Do you not hear to-day. The mighty beat of onward feet, and know you not their way? 'Tis forward, 'tis upward, onto the fair white arch of Freedom's dome and there is room for each man who would march.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic, let's go around one more time. Let's stipulate that James work and it's already been said here in relation to the way King picks up the rhetoric. So, let's stipulate that James Weldon Johnson, one could not imagine a more important modern rhetorical precursor. So, let's each just assume that and pick out a phrase. We've already started to do a phrase line that will look absolutely forward and be used later as part of the rhetoric of civil rights. Just to underscore how important Johnson is. And if you want, as you go around you can also say why you think Johnson is so important and may be more important than a lot of teachers and students realize?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
'The mighty beat of onward Feet and know you not their way.' If that is not indicative of the ways that once we have visual images of Southern resistance to the civil rights movement part of what the poem is saying at that point is the inevitability of the transformation that's gonna happen. You know, so part of what the poem does in that moment is to take the rhetoric about freedom and say, you already know what this sounds like but you haven't used the rhetoric in that way until now.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
I like this line here. It's a very subtle thing onto the fair white arch of freedom's dome. There is room. So, I picked like the non rhyming lines, it was difficult to read.

AL FILREIS:
He makes it rhyme though.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Yeah, exactly.

AL FILREIS:
How does he do that?

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
I don't know.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
He says Rome instead of...

AL FILREIS:
Dome and Rome, he also says God.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
Doesn't he?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
That's something else altogether.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
So, I think that those two lines form a swerve because when I hear that white arch there, I think of God's trombones. I'm thinking of go down death where he talks about the white throne. He's talking about the pearly gates in heaven. And then you get this swerve to freedom stone where you think of the capitol building. When he say, you get this kind of move from again, I think the divine to faith in man.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
I mean, there's the 'just forward to upward.' But I wanna push to the next stanza and talk about ‘to springtime to work time.’ The world is young again because I think the other part is like the inevitability of time moving forward but also this idea that we can think of the civil rights movement and the movements that were tied to it. The women's rights movement, the gay liberation movement and black power movement as moments when the nation is reinventing itself, right? And so, what does it mean to think of the world as young again mean... In 1907, the world is quite literally young, right? It's a new century. But that bald, I'm sorry Baldwin that Johnson is here tying a new century. And we can think of also the New Negro movement or the Harlem Renaissance movement as we call it, to this nation being reborn.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, that's great. That's really great. Let me just add mine. A gospel new for all for you, it's been commented on and then man shall be saved by man. So, there's one way to read that which is Christian, and that is that amen Jesus Christ would be you know, God's way of saving people. But I like to think... But that's not the way the civil rights movement is gonna do it. The civil rights movement is gonna say, we are a secular democracy and but nonetheless, godly. So, this is how King manages rhetorically to pull this thing off by continuing to be godly by using the church's structures, obviously. But by saying the demands that we make, we are constituted inalienable, sorry to make that an adverb, by self-evident equality. But it's not God-given, it's people giving to people, man to man. So, the secular democracy is being demanded here in the rhetoric of godliness. And it is about as powerful a piece of logic that surely the civil rights move movement got from this and other things like it.

OK, we could go on forever and ever, which is a great thing about a poem like this. But let's just go around and say one last thing. It's gonna be brief but one point you wanted to make. You came all the way here and you had a point to make and you didn't get to do it. So, here's your chance. Chris, you wanna start? Is there something about the recording that you'd like to tell us that you haven't had a chance to yet?

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
I would just encourage people to go to the PennSound page and listen to the poems from God's Trombones, ‘The Creation’ and ‘Go Down Death,’ because I think it's so important to hear Johnson read them because the written poems are actually the scoring of speech sounds. He's trying to capture the sounds of African American preachers of the early 20th century on paper because at the time he didn't have access to recording media. And so, later he has the chance to record these poems. And so, I always encourage people to listen to the poems alongside the text of those poems.

AL FILREIS:
Terrific, thank you. Salamishah your last word.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Sure. I mean, what this poem enables us to do is to think about text in relationship to the civil rights movement in new ways. And so, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall as a historian, has a term called the long civil rights movement. And part of what I think is useful about Johnson's poem as it anticipates civil rights moves and prophetic you know, articulations by people like King and Baldwin and Simone. It also allows us to understand that this stuff was always kind of in the atmosphere. And that Johnson is an obvious precursor to some of these later moves and that's really. So, it gives us a new way of thinking about kind of a long civil rights aesthetic. I think that's helpful for us.

AL FILREIS:
That's great and name the writer who wrote that book again?

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Oh, it's an essay Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (INAUDIBLE).

AL FILREIS:
H-A-L-L.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Yep.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, great. Thank you. Herm, final word.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
A couple things. One point in two parts, one I'm just really struck by how Johnson captures the cadences of what will become the modern African American sermon. That's the first thing. And the second thing, I think this poem anticipates Langston Hughes's ‘Let America be America Again.’

AL FILREIS:
Can you say just a little more about that?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Well, because part of what Hughes is saying, is that the seeds of what we can become are already here. The design is here, but we've never adhered to the design. And so when he says, let America be America again, part of what he's saying is, let's actually take seriously the original design that was put forth. And there's some of that going on in the Johnson poem.

AL FILREIS:
The promise, you know?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Yeah, the promise.

AL FILREIS:
This is something that lots of political rhetoric has used and white political rhetoric that you know, Kennedy got from Frost, when you know Frost said, you know the land was ours before we were the land all that manifest destiny stuff. But in involved in that is this assumption that we made promise that hadn't been fulfilled. And so, here's where it comes. Well, my final thought is to go back to that first stanza and look at the phrase, 'the word made known to the nations.' This is when all is said and done, a meta poem because it is a clarion call that's saying you need to listen to any clarion call that comes around. And this happens to be one of them. And if you cannot hear the cadences of this poem, you're kind of doomed. So, listen and hear too. The word made known to the nations, the word made known published, the word is this, this is the word. And of course, that's very New Testament (UNKNOWN) as well. Well, we like to end Poem Talk with a minute or two of gathering paradise, which is a chance for several of us or all three, if you're quick to spread wide our narrow hands to gather a little something really poetically good to hail or commend someone or something going on in the poetry world.

Herman Beavers, gather some paradise.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Robin Coste Lewis, 'Voyage of the Sable Venus,' which won the National Book Award.

AL FILREIS:
Say a little more. I've been reading about her. The response has been extremely positive from all quarters.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
You know, just that I think she was really the dark horse. I think that people thought that Terrence Hayes would win the award and...

AL FILREIS:
For 'How to be Drawn.'

HERMAN BEAVERS:
'How to be Drawn.'

AL FILREIS:
Didn't 'How to be Drawn' win some other prizes?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
I'm not aware of that but I know that it's been highly regarded. But Lewis snuck in there and got it. It's a very fine book.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. Chris Mustazza, gather some paradise.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
Oh, yeah. I would like to recommend work by my colleague Ariel Resnikoff, who's here at Penn in the comparative literature department. And Ariel does translations he writes poems and everything I've read from him has been fantastic. So, I really recommend Ariel's work.

AL FILREIS:
Great. (AUDIO DISTORTS)

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
I'm really out of my element in this way, but I'm actually really excited about...

AL FILREIS:
Wait a minute. You're adding...

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Now all of a sudden.

AL FILREIS:
You know what? You are paradise.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
(LAUGHS).

AL FILREIS:
Why don't we just gather you, you're paradise.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Thank you.

AL FILREIS:
It's great to see you.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Thank you. Well, I was just gonna say that speaking of prizes but in different world of the Grammys, but Kendrick Lamar's leading the Grammy nods with 'To Pimp a Butterfly.' I'm actually really excited to think about the possibilities of this political moment in the artistic production that's happening and maybe it being recognized by institutions that haven't actually been so good about hip hop for the last couple of years.

AL FILREIS:
Say just a little more about all that, if you don't mind.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Oh, OK. Well, you know...

AL FILREIS:
That was so positive. Is there an edgy version of that?

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
(LAUGHS) Well, it's been very challenging for hip hop artists to be recognized for album of the year or record of the year by the Grammy committee. So, it now to have this album which was so politically explicit and tied by happenstance, but also by design to the social movements that we're seeing. It's exciting to see that kind of album recognize in this moment by the...

AL FILREIS:
Silly question for you, how does scholars train in literature add to the conversation about this? I mean, why do you feel like you're in a position to understand this situation based on your literary?

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Or growing up as a hip-hop, yeah.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
So, maybe actually the literary scholar.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
No, the literary stuff.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Actually was a big detour.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
(LAUGHS) No, it's true. No, it's I think you know, Herman and I often talk about the relationship between the literary and the musical and how our work tries to bridge these two different fields. But for someone like James Weldon Johnson, he was moving in and out of the musical and literary quite easily. So, I think it makes sense. I was trying to go back to you know, his musical literary roots by talking about Kendrick Lamar right now. (LAUGHS)

AL FILREIS:
No, I got it.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
(LAUGHS)

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
It turns out he actually released a song called 'O Southland.' It's like different lyrics.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Yes.

CHISTOPHER MUSTAZZA:
But it was like a couple years after this.

AL FILREIS:
I found it.

SALAMISHAH TILLET:
Yes.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Somehow, I just knew that.

AL FILREIS:
I think we with you know, if you Google it you find the sheet music for it and I try to map it onto this and it didn't match at all. So, what do you think he was doing? Just taking advantage of a well-known poem title and writing a different song?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
I don't know. I mean, I'm wondering if maybe this was really like his kind of... I don't know the lyrics of the song but just by title, I wonder if maybe it really speaks to his relationship is with the South and his wanting to kind of to think about what the South can do to modernize itself.

AL FILREIS:
So, for my gathering paradise, I just want to cede my time, as they say in the Senate, to Chris and ask him a question. The Greet Cabell recordings.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Right.

AL FILREIS:
Really important that they did this because although mostly they were doing dialect studies, they got some poetry in there.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
And it's very important that they did. On the other hand, overall and I'm gonna use the word creepy and I don't really mean to, but you know the project gives me the creeps a little bit that it was so dialect focused. They thought let's bring this guy Johnson in because you can teach us about you know, these weren't literary people.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Well I mean, I don't know that it's creepy because I don't know that they really saw the dialect. I make the claim that the dialect and the poetry are related, but I don't know that they... I think that they thought of them as separate projects. That we have this equipment to record dialect samples. It's kind of early DIY audio. And we should use it, see, to record poets.

AL FILREIS:
OK.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Because they actually write like a polemic about the commercial record companies refusing to record poets 'cause it wasn't sufficiently commercial. And so, I think that they see this as a very democratic project of giving voice to people who wouldn't otherwise be recorded.

AL FILREIS:
Oh, yes.

HERMAN BEAVERS:
If you had to go into a commercial recording scheme.

AL FILREIS:
Oh, great. I'm really glad I asked that question. So, they were just using the opportunity to... Might as well get some things down for the record then they put them on a medium, aluminum. Is it aluminum?

HERMAN BEAVERS:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
Aluminum, this that turned out to be impossible to deal with now, but they couldn't possibly have known that then. Well, that's all the trumpet blown and world made known we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writer's House is a collaboration of the center for programs in contemporary writing and the Kelly Writer's House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation, poetryfoundation.org. Thanks so much to my guests, Herman Beaver, Salamishah Tillett and Chris Mustazza, and to Poem Talk's directors and engineers today, Zach Cardina and Ari Lewis. Ari, this is your first time doing Poem Talk. Take a bow in there, Ari. There she is. Alright. Thank you Ari. And to Poem Talk's editor of the same amazing Zach Cardina. Next time on Poem Talk for episode number 99. I will be joined by Joseph Massey, Michelle, Gill Montero and Anna Strong. And we'll be talking about the poetry of William Bronc. This is Al Filreis and I hope you'll join us for that or another episode of Poem Talk.