Christopher Carroll of The New York Review of Books writes that Mingus once got in trouble for chasing a bandmate across a stage with an axe, and chastised noisy audiences by telling them, “Isaac Stern doesn’t have to put up with this shit.”
He was also one of its most volatile personalities, subject to clinical depression and a violent temper that resulted in the musician getting into altercations – both verbal and physical – with other members of his ensemble and even concert audiences. It is also appropriate given the guiding spirit that animates Swan’s second collection.Ĭharles Mingus was a virtuoso of the double bass, and one of 20th-century jazz music’s great innovators. For me writing is writing.” The disavowal of proscribed categories is appropriate for an artist like Swan, a Toronto resident of mixed Bermudan and Jamaican heritage who defiantly straddles the line between the improvisatory attitude of slam and spoken-word poetry and the more formalized world of print poetry. “There are different ways you have to manipulate your work so that it fits a medium. Hughes acknowledges his kinship with his community in this poem, and admires them for their sage-like calmness in dealing with a life that others would perhaps be extremely unhappy with.“Genre doesn’t exist,” claims Dane Swan in a 2013 interview on the website Black Coffee Poet. This community is united in their efforts to imagine a brighter future for their children, and their children’s children, and so on, and hang out to the hope of such a future to get through the day. Hence Langston Hughes and his fellow African-Americans keep searching for this silver lining, and mostly manage to find it too. However, a common adage says that every cloud has a silver lining. This kind of treatment can cause calamities in their lives like a flood.
The African-Americans bear the discrimination and oppression meted out to them by the mainstream white society with patience, and learn to accept it as a part and parcel of their lives.
If this is taken to be true, then ‘April Rain Song’ can be read as an allegory of the resilience of the African-American community. This interpretation may seem to be purely speculative in nature, but there is ample evidence in the poetry of Langston Hughes to suggest that he always brings in references to African-American life in some way or the other – whether such references are explicit or implicit. Deeper Meaning: This part of the poem explanation focuses on how ‘April Rain Song’ may appear to be a simple poem at its surface from a single reading of its content, but how it has a hidden layer of meaning beneath.
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