4 Comments for “Poem: House in the World”

1. (click to show comment)

   Langston Hughes’ poem “House in the World” is brutal and harsh. My friend Emily Bernard, a Langston Hughes scholar, recently invited me to discuss this poem with her. She also bid me two years ago to contemplate the poem’s multiple meanings and figurative dimensions.
   It would be too easy to merely read the poem in light of American racial politics. The degree to which one agrees or disagrees with Hughes could serve as a barometer by which one detects (or not) the footprints of imperialism, colonialism, and racism across the globe, by which one cares (or not) about the ravages and impact of Western powers, thought, and arrogance on non-Western and “third-world” nations.
   We know “white shadows” do not exist, but in Hughes’ metaphoric mind, they do. Hughes was a deeply sensitive poet who could not turn his aesthetic eye away from history, from the injustices done to his “dark brothers.” This “turning away” is an unbridled privilege we “poets” exercise, and maybe it is very, very necessary.
   I, for one, try not to take this for granted, especially as I consider this poem on the fifth anniversary of America’s war in Iraq.

   

   Posted By: Major Jackson on March 25, 2008 at 1:37 pm

2. (click to show comment)

   Thanks for posting this powerful poem. It’s one of the most spine-tingling I’ve read recently by a poet I frequently find spine-tingling. The sounds of the w’s in the first stanza contrasted with the u sounds in the second stanza are part of it, but it’s really everything—syntax, imagery, feeling–making a dense whole, a talisman poem.
   To me the crux is the word “world”–the impossibility of a house in the world, of unmitigated presence in the world, the irony of having to try to deconstruct one’s inheritance in order to gain access to what we know on some level should by rights have been “natural”ly available before the inheritance was ever made conscious. But it isn’t.
   As does so much of Hughes, this poem evokes the tragedies of racism so aptly that it feels to me it also evokes the pain of other kinds of tragedies that dispossess us from ourselves and from having a place for ourselves in the world.
   Thanks again Major.
   Annie

   

   Posted By: Annie Finch on March 25, 2008 at 7:02 pm

3. (click to show comment)

   Thank you for this.
   Hughes’ poem made me think of this one:
   CUARTO OSCURO
   en cada casa
   hay un cuarto
   oscuro
   enclaustrado
   entre paredes
   de otros cuartos
   a los hombres
   no les parece
   molestar
   lo consideran
   lo más normal
   de la vida
   pero viven ahí
   en esa mazmorra
   sin ventanas
   lla madre
   la hija
   la esposa
   FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN
   DARK ROOM
   in every house
   there is a dark
   room
   hidden
   by the walls
   of other rooms
   it doesn’t seem
   to bother
   men
   they consider it
   the most normal
   thing in life
   but there inside
   that cell without
   windows live
   the mother
   the daughter
   the wife
   my translation from the Spanish
   from FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF NIGHT
   New and Selected Poems

   

   Posted By: Francisco Aragón on March 25, 2008 at 10:47 pm

4. (click to show comment)

   Dear Major,
   Thank you for sharing this poem.
   Hope to see you soon.
   Warm wishes,
   Prageeta

   

   Posted By: prageeta on April 10, 2008 at 4:44 pm

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