I recently participated in a docent training1 session at our local art museum, in which we were taught the art of “close seeing.” (For you literature fiends, it’s like close reading, but also not.) The instructor trundled out a floor-to-ceiling chain link screen in the museum’s (eek!) storage area, and the crowd of us stood in front of an enormous collage-style painting, and, under the guidance of the curator, we looked.
Click here to look with me. There’s a lot to see in this image, a dizzying mix of striking figures and activity and movement. But what struck me was the way the title informed our understanding of the work. It wasn’t till after a robust thirty minutes or more of reporting what we were all seeing that our guide told us the name of the Brett De Palma painting: “Scuttlebutt in the Horse Latitudes.” We unpacked the significance of those words, and suddenly, the life-sized work of art unfolded new meanings.
It’s similar to Jean Toomer’s poem “Storm Ending,” except the insight doesn’t come from the title as much as from understanding the cultural moment into which the poem is written. Flowers, wind, sun, rain: on first read, this is (it really is) a brief, gorgeous imaging of a thunderstorm rumbling through a landscape and then away. But you know what it also is? Listen first; then I’ll tell you:
Poet (and novelist and essayist) Jean Toomer is often considered part of the Harlem Renaissance, that vibrant movement beginning in the 1920’s, when Black art, music, wordcraft, and performance became recognized on a larger scale2 against the ugly, thriving reality of Jim Crow. The poem “Storm Ending” was published early in Toomer’s career, when he was often writing politically.3
How does placing the poem in this context make you read it differently? Click here to read the full text and do some close reading (or, as this poem is a litany of strong, surprising images, do some close seeing). What reads differently now? I picture women’s full-lipped faces. I notice a violence in the stricken ears, the biting sun, the bleeding rain. When the sweet earth flies from the thunder, I wonder what it running from.
Context isn’t always necessary to understanding a poem. It isn’t necessary for a partial understanding of this one. (And goodness, it isn’t necessary to understand a poem to receive it.) But I like the times when a particular piece of information turns the poem into something different, something more.
Do you have a favorite poem that can be read one way without context and then another with more information?
Gosh, why didn’t I do this years ago?
Okay, so that’s the tamest possible definition of the Harlem Renaissance. In reality, it was a great big jubilation of Black art and accomplishment and community and hope and drive and Langston Hughes saying that the white Americans who had relegated him to the kitchen would soon receive him at the table and see that he is beautiful.
You may have noticed I didn’t call Toomer a Black poet. Though descended from slaves, he was ambivalent both about association with the Harlem Renaissance and with the idea of claiming a black (or white, since he could pass) identity. Instead, he had the idea that America was creating a new race that transcended ethnic identities. While there is an understandable range of critique about the notion of rejecting one’s ethnicity, I think the surprisingness of Toomer’s perspective is important to mention in this current American moment when it is so tempting to think of people as monoliths. Yes, Toomer wrote as a black man during the Harlem Renaissance and Jim Crow, but he was more nuanced than just that, as we all are.
Two things:
1) You're going to love the picture book I'm covering next week, "There Was a Party for Langston."
2) I read Jean Toomer's "Cane" a year ago. I could not get over how modern it was, and it's 100 years old. I didn't know much about him (thank you for the info!), but he was certainly ahead of his time.