be-bop--this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes sudden naunces, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rythems, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes like the popular song, puncuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and distortions of the music of a community in transition."Langston Hughes, a poet who had cut his teeth and made his mark as a blues` poet, took up the challenge of writing book-length bebop jazz peom! Although, just like the music, there is a bedrock of blues undergirding the jazz structure, Hughes objective and success was in creating a modern jazz structure that allowed for a broader range of themes, voices, and even styles. Some of the poems are epigrams, some are written as actual letters, some are conversations, and others are monologs; more than once we have poems that amount to sayings, folk definitions, and observations. Indeed, Montage is aptly named. In the whole history of American literature, no one has written a comparable poem that bases itself on a music form, and certainly no one has ever come close in the context of jazz. All other efforts at jazz poetry pale in comparison.Consider that Hughes does not take the easy way out. He chose not to emphasize the names of musicians or the names of musical compostions. There is no attempt to imitate the sound of the horns (as was common in much of the Black Arts music-based poetry). The mosaic quality of the music, the intensity of expression, the fluid, quicksilver rhythms, and the complex melodic counterpoint and harmonic daring of bebop are all achieved by a deft use of simple words, precise punctuation, and italics. The complexity of the overall composition notwithstanding, the individual parts seem too simple to be true, but Montage works so sublimely because Hughes figured out precisely how to get to the heart of the expression without bothering with or getting caught up in external f...
