Word: poems
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Harlem in the Evening is not a "plain story." The production is extremely complex, with little character development and less plot to hold it together. Gene Bone and Howard Fenton, both of whom worked with Hughes before his death, composed and conceived Harlem in the Evening from Hughes's poems, lyrics and drama as a cross-section of life in Harlem. In many ways the play is like Hughes's long poem about Harlem, Montage of a Dream Deferred, from which some of the script was taken. It has the same sudden shifts in pace, mixing quick jazz tempos with...
...organ background, a problem at several points during the play. Robert Honeysucker is the wizened Old Man, detached from the fast pace of Harlem, able to look at the entire scene with a broader historical perspective. And his recital of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," a short but powerful poem about the black's hard struggle from the shores of the Congo to the banks of the Mississippi, loses its strength when accompanied by the soap-opera-like organ...
...Respighi. The work of this modern Italian composer is hardly a touchstone of Western music: he is a minor impressionist whose works are played more often than they deserve. Western critics might denounce him too, if anyone cared. The diatribe in Jenmin Jih Pao specifically cited Respighi's symphonic poem, Pines of Rome for stimulating "empty talk about changes in contrasts and emotions" which tries to "gloss over the class content.... so as to pull the wool over the eyes of the masses and deceive them...
...remember the 1972 spring offensive, when the North Vietnamese army packed its rations, shouldered its rifles and marched south to free its country as American bombers droned overhead. The North Vietnamese issued one general directive, in the form of a poem, part of which follows, "Liberation fighter, spring in Vietnam is ineffably beautiful. Tet is unbelievably epic. Apricot blossoms vie with each other to cheer your feats. Swallows take wing, telling our countrymen north and south of your deeds. Liberation fighter, let off your gun this spring instead of the usual firecrackers. And ornament Vietnam's spring with everlasting beauty...
...information center for the Children of God today is London. But Leader Moses David stays as elusive as Howard Hughes, making contact with the members only in his weekly epistles called "Mo Letters" and through what might be described as fundamentalist pornography. Berg's poem Mountin' Maid, for instance, is 300 lines of awful doggerel urging women to bare their breasts. Sample line: Can't we leave those summits bare Without all that underwear...