Goodbye Langston: My Tribute to Langston Hughes

By M.e. Miller

Goodbye Langston is a tribute to Langston Hughes, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Along the way it celebrates Miles Davis, Lena Horne, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr, Billie Holiday and more. This book says goodbye a poet who I feel was never properly honored when he lived. This
Is my personal and private goodbye.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483663838

M.e. Miller

In 1996, I was thirty years of age and I didn’t want to live. Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks was 79 and didn’t want to die. She wrote me three times between 1996 and 1998. Her first two letters were mostly about poetry. But her final letter was different and more personal. It was not about similes or metaphors. It was not about style or meter. It was about life and closure. I tried to decipher a three page letter she mailed to me, but I was too immersed in my own complicated life to realize what she might have been expressing. I could not effectively read between the lines. Gwen was saying goodbye to me and to the world. Soon there would be no more letters from Gwen. Not to me. Not to anyone. A few years later I read she had passed away. I will take to my grave most of the thoughts she shared. Gwendolyn was trying to pass a baton of legacy to a new generation of poets. In 2010, I reached out for it and started running. I am still running.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by M.e. Miller.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2013912015

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4836-6382-1

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4836-6383-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/10/2013

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Contents

Introduction

Sincerely Langston Hughes

Genesis

Goodnight Miss Sippi (1832)

Birth O’ The Blues

Summer Time (1946)

Steal Away To The Blues

Diary Of A Dream Deferred

Diary Of A Dream Deferred

Uncle Thomas

Heroes Black

Heroes White

Aint A Bad Time At All

Kinda Blue (Ooo bee ooo bee dooo)

I Used To Sell Anger

Hopscotch In Harlem

A Jar Full Of Dreams

Jazz Legends

A Black Man Speaks To Rivers

Suicide Note

Sara

Billie’s Blues

A Jar Full Of Dreams (1956)

Goodbye Langston

Between Gwen And Me

Stormy Weather

Harlem Blue

Before I Go Home

What Sends Them Harvard Poets

Goodbye Langston

Revelations

My Tribute To Langston Hughes

M.e. Miller was professionally published before he graduated from high school. His dialect poems, Black Shoes and What Ya Stealin’ For? were enough to impress the University of Puget Sound, where he pursued English and Journalism. Ten years later, Ellis went from the page to the stage, performing in more than a hundred shows. He would grow to become an orator, and a dramatist, teaching himself to perform in more than twenty different stage voices, ultimately adding actor to his resume. He used his ability more often to help people who were victims of abuse and injustice. On stage he tells stories by combining prose and poetry, naming his style Prosetry.

Compared often to renaissance poet Langston Hughes, Ellis worked for years to expand his repertoire, hoping to be more than a dialect poet. The pressure of historical comparison began to take a devastating toll and he searched for an out in the career he was born to pursue.

In 1996 Pulitzer prize winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, wrote him the first of four times. She told him to calm down because it would all make sense in time. She was prophetically correct.

For

Evelyn Garrett, Lorraine Diggs, Esther Scaggs,

Malika, Tifarrah, Jabril, Quy-Imah,

Jesse Davis, Donald Bakeer,

Cynthia Fleetwood, Shirley Richards

And Shirley Williams

And millions more

I wanted to write the best slavery poem ever written—perhaps win a Pulitzer or a Faulkner or something. And I had every intention of conforming to the standards of modern verse and composition; lyrics fluidly written, perfect in frame, tempo and time—But a lot of my thoughts on slavery were just too difficult to rhyme.

(Thesis For English 121)                  M.e. Miller

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"Some day I expect to read where you have been honored

as the greatest poet since Langston Hughes."

Jesse Davis (June