Kathy Lou Schultz | University of Memphis (original) (raw)

Papers by Kathy Lou Schultz

John Wiley & Sons, Ltd eBooks, Mar 28, 2014

Critical reengagement with Melvin B. Tolson’s writing from the 1930s and 1940s makes clear that h... more Critical reengagement with Melvin B. Tolson’s writing from the 1930s and 1940s makes clear that his later Afro-Modernist epics, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965), are not merely anomalies out of sync with the developments of modernism, nor even distanced from African American schools of writing. Rather, Tolson’s engagement with the contemporary poetic practices of his time results in a traceable trajectory from modern free verse, influenced by Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg; to experimental modernist practice in the 1940s, drawing from T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s methods; and finally to the development of Afro-Modernist innovation in Libretto and Harlem Gallery, as he realizes his own vision for the Afro-Modernist epic. As he becomes more fluent in his own particular modernist practice, Tolson’s task of decolonizing what Aldon Nielsen describes as “the colonized master text of modernism,” (244) results in a “rearticulation of modernism [that] led him eventually to assert African progenitors in the realm of technique” (247). Tolson’s Afro-Modernism is marked by a diasporic worldview in which multiple lineages, including those from Africa, Europe, and Asia, are incorporated into his work.1 This diasporic imagination, which is inherently transnational, is present in the Afro-Modernist epics of Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka as well. Each of these poets turned to the epic form to include large swaths of diasporic history in their retellings of African American genealogies.

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2013

In an interview conducted the year before his death, Tolson gives the following reply to the ques... more In an interview conducted the year before his death, Tolson gives the following reply to the question “I understand that you have lived a varied, and, in many instances, a hazardous life?” Tennyson’s protagonist says in Ulysses, “Much have I seen and known…” And, again, “I am part of all that I have met…”—as shoeshine boy, stevedore, soldier, janitor, packinghouse worker, cook on a railroad, waiter in a beach-front hotel, boxer, actor, football coach, director of drama, lecturer for the NAACP, organizer of sharecroppers’ unions, teacher, father of Ph.D.’s, poet laureate of a foreign country, painter, newspaper columnist, four-time mayor of a town, facer of mobs. I have made my way in the world since I was twelve years old. (“Interview” 184) Though Tolson certainly was given to flights of verbal arabesque, an examination of his biography reveals this self-description to be accurate. An African American man who compares himself to Tennyson’s Ulysses—and quotes Tennyson at will—Tolson has defied categorization. In life, as well as in art, Tolson was dynamic, slippery, complex, and never easily understood. An English professor (he taught for more than 40 years at historically black colleges: Wiley College in Texas and Langston College in Oklahoma) Tolson quotes, or specifically refers to the work of, not only Tennyson, but also Heraclitus, Cocteau, Pound, Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Saul Bellow, Freud, Proust, Victor Hugo, Whitman, Hart Crane, Jelly Roll Morton, and Plato, amongst others in this one interview.

Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Dec 6, 2013

In Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) Melvin B. Tolson writes into the voids in official... more In Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) Melvin B. Tolson writes into the voids in official histories, highlighting the fact that the construction of the archive—of memory—must constantly be tended. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Tolson seeks to preserve the histories of people of African descent throughout the diaspora, writing into the void to un-silence black voices. Tolson’s book-length Libretto is his first major Afro-Modernist epic, following on his experiments with the serial poem and modernist techniques in the early 1940s. Tolson’s experimental forms in Libretto produce a fluidity that allow the poem to flow both backward and forward in historical time, and in and through a multiplicity of identities.

... "In the modern vein": Afro-Modernist poetry and literary history. Kathy Lou Schultz... more ... "In the modern vein": Afro-Modernist poetry and literary history. Kathy Lou Schultz, University of Pennsylvania. ... I analyze the vexed relationship between dialect and standard English in the work of James Weldon Johnson, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and WEB Du Bois. ...

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2013

In “Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem” (1951), Langston Hughes writes and unwrites history... more In “Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem” (1951), Langston Hughes writes and unwrites history, reflecting the mobility and stasis, the starts and stops, on the path toward achievement of modern selfhood in a culture determined to infinitely defer African Americans’ freedoms. First published in the February 1951 issue of Crisis, “Prelude” is a 208-line, 38-stanza poem. In Crisis, it ran for four pages (87–90) while in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1995) it runs for six (379–384). Thus, it is not one of the short lyrics to which present-day readers of the canonical Hughes may be accustomed. For example, more than half of the Hughes poems in the second edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2004) are short lyrics from the 1920s—those poems for which Hughes is most well known such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and “Danse Africaine” (1922). However, Hughes’s works that were first published in the 1950s that are collected in the anthology (“Juke Box Love Song,” “Dream Boogie,” “Harlem,” and “Motto”) that appear to be short lyrics as well, are all actually part of Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). Yet there is no indication of that, leading readers to believe that Hughes’s poetics had not shifted in 30 years.

Plume Poetry, Issue #74, September, 2017

Kathy Lou Schultz: Teaching African-American Poetry in the Age of Trump Teaching African American... more Kathy Lou Schultz: Teaching African-American Poetry in the Age of Trump Teaching African American Poetry in the Age of Trump Poetry can't change the world. The world where we witness horrors from the dismissal of every child's right to receive a quality education and live in a safe environment, to white racists toting semi-automatic weapons and the Nazi flag through the streets. The world where we wait to see what will become of any of us with a "pre-existing condition," and pray that a pissing match between two men does not escalate into nuclear warfare. Poetry can't change that. How can poetry even enter into the conversation? My commitment to poetry has evolved over my teaching and writing life. I first "officially" taught poetry in 1994 at San Francisco State University, where I received my MFA. Before that I taught poetry to teen moms while I was in college. I've taught "adult" (i.e. non-traditional) students at Temple University, and high school students at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia and from a KIPP charter school in Texas. I taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where I completed my PhD, and for the last 11 years, I've taught at a large, chronically underfunded public university in Memphis. And despite the fact that the English Department where I work has proven in dollars and cents that it runs in the black-and not in the red (yes, English is a revenue-generating department!) I'm immersed in a culture that tells me that the humanities aren't worth funding. So why teach poetry? What does the study of poetry actually yield? In my years of teaching, I have observed that the study of poetry enables students to develop core abilities that are desperately needed in the age of Trump. These skills include: 1) Critical Literacy: the ability not only to read the wide variety of printed information we're surrounded by, but also to analyze it and form supportable arguments; 2) Knowledge of History: Students must research the historical contexts in which the poems are written and set, as well as the variety of allusions to events, people, texts, songs, etc.; 3) Patience. As my friend, clarinetist Carina Nyberg Washington, pointed out, the beauty of poetry, like the beauty of classical (and other forms of) music is only revealed to those who put in the time and practice to study it; 4) Radical Empathy: especially for those we consider different or "foreign"; and 5) Activation of Imaginative Capabilities: Only if we develop our abilities to imagine positive alternatives to our current destructive policies and behaviors can we begin to create social change. Yes, teaching poetry is crucial in 2017. My students and I laugh together when I tell them that poetry is one of the reasons I get up in the morning. However, this isn't the only reason some think me an unusual case. When people learn that one of my major research and teaching areas is African American literature, particularly poetry, some react with surprise or even suspicion: "How did YOU [a white woman] get interested in THAT [insert various judgments here]?" An administrator even asked me, "Are you actually white?" If I focused my efforts on white women's poetry, what questions would they ask? How about if it were Shakespeare? Because of the reasons underlying such questions about my vocation, my teaching of African American poetry must also involve teaching something about my own race, gender, class and sexual identities, and how my experience and actions both reflect and resist prevailing assumptions. I have rigorously examined my own privilege and disadvantages in an effort to understand stereotypes and truths about white women, so that I may more deeply engage students with the historical meanings assigned to race, class, gender, and sexuality in America. I want students to think about how we got here-the age of Trump-and how we can chart our way toward a more merciful, peaceful place where we might want to live.

Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 3.1 (June 2019). 117-126., 2019

This essay analyzes Claudia Rankine's first book, Nothing in Nature is Private, showing that alth... more This essay analyzes Claudia Rankine's first book, Nothing in Nature is Private, showing that although the book is formally dissimilar to her later work, it includes themes that continue to be foundational to her writing practice. From the title of the first poem, "American Light," in this first book, to the subtitle of her two most recent books of poetry ("An American Lyric") Rankine has dwelt in the history and multiple meanings of the "American." Nothing in Nature is Private allows us to deeply consider a black female subject's relationship to the American landscape, history, and literary lineages. Moreover, this analysis enlarges debates both about how subjectivity is framed and how it is related to poetic form.

from Efforts and Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship (Univ. of Iowa Press)

Building is a Process / Light is an Element: Essays and Excursions for Myung Mi Kim, 2008

Journal of Modern Literature, 2012

This essay analyzes Amiri Baraka's Afro-Modernist epic, Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Song (Djeli Y... more This essay analyzes Amiri Baraka's Afro-Modernist epic, Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Song (Djeli Ya) throughout its composition process, within the contexts of Classical epic traditions, early twentieth-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa. Wise is an Afro-Modernist epic that is unique in several respects: the epic shifts from the individual hero traditionally seen in the epic form to the collective, and displays a transnational, diasporic worldview opposed to a unitary national consciousness. Baraka uses the genre of the epic that at foundation coalesces national identity to question those very foundations. Wise does not follow the traditional narrative of the epic journey; the African American collective is unable to return to a physical location called " home." Instead, Wise improvises a home for the African American collective through the act of performance, creating a jazz text combining poetry, music and visual art.

Contemporary Literature, 2011

and Contemporary Literature's anonymous readers for their generous feedback at various stages of ... more and Contemporary Literature's anonymous readers for their generous feedback at various stages of this project.

Talks by Kathy Lou Schultz

John Wiley & Sons, Ltd eBooks, Mar 28, 2014

Critical reengagement with Melvin B. Tolson’s writing from the 1930s and 1940s makes clear that h... more Critical reengagement with Melvin B. Tolson’s writing from the 1930s and 1940s makes clear that his later Afro-Modernist epics, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965), are not merely anomalies out of sync with the developments of modernism, nor even distanced from African American schools of writing. Rather, Tolson’s engagement with the contemporary poetic practices of his time results in a traceable trajectory from modern free verse, influenced by Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg; to experimental modernist practice in the 1940s, drawing from T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s methods; and finally to the development of Afro-Modernist innovation in Libretto and Harlem Gallery, as he realizes his own vision for the Afro-Modernist epic. As he becomes more fluent in his own particular modernist practice, Tolson’s task of decolonizing what Aldon Nielsen describes as “the colonized master text of modernism,” (244) results in a “rearticulation of modernism [that] led him eventually to assert African progenitors in the realm of technique” (247). Tolson’s Afro-Modernism is marked by a diasporic worldview in which multiple lineages, including those from Africa, Europe, and Asia, are incorporated into his work.1 This diasporic imagination, which is inherently transnational, is present in the Afro-Modernist epics of Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka as well. Each of these poets turned to the epic form to include large swaths of diasporic history in their retellings of African American genealogies.

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2013

In an interview conducted the year before his death, Tolson gives the following reply to the ques... more In an interview conducted the year before his death, Tolson gives the following reply to the question “I understand that you have lived a varied, and, in many instances, a hazardous life?” Tennyson’s protagonist says in Ulysses, “Much have I seen and known…” And, again, “I am part of all that I have met…”—as shoeshine boy, stevedore, soldier, janitor, packinghouse worker, cook on a railroad, waiter in a beach-front hotel, boxer, actor, football coach, director of drama, lecturer for the NAACP, organizer of sharecroppers’ unions, teacher, father of Ph.D.’s, poet laureate of a foreign country, painter, newspaper columnist, four-time mayor of a town, facer of mobs. I have made my way in the world since I was twelve years old. (“Interview” 184) Though Tolson certainly was given to flights of verbal arabesque, an examination of his biography reveals this self-description to be accurate. An African American man who compares himself to Tennyson’s Ulysses—and quotes Tennyson at will—Tolson has defied categorization. In life, as well as in art, Tolson was dynamic, slippery, complex, and never easily understood. An English professor (he taught for more than 40 years at historically black colleges: Wiley College in Texas and Langston College in Oklahoma) Tolson quotes, or specifically refers to the work of, not only Tennyson, but also Heraclitus, Cocteau, Pound, Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Saul Bellow, Freud, Proust, Victor Hugo, Whitman, Hart Crane, Jelly Roll Morton, and Plato, amongst others in this one interview.

Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Dec 6, 2013

In Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) Melvin B. Tolson writes into the voids in official... more In Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) Melvin B. Tolson writes into the voids in official histories, highlighting the fact that the construction of the archive—of memory—must constantly be tended. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Tolson seeks to preserve the histories of people of African descent throughout the diaspora, writing into the void to un-silence black voices. Tolson’s book-length Libretto is his first major Afro-Modernist epic, following on his experiments with the serial poem and modernist techniques in the early 1940s. Tolson’s experimental forms in Libretto produce a fluidity that allow the poem to flow both backward and forward in historical time, and in and through a multiplicity of identities.

... "In the modern vein": Afro-Modernist poetry and literary history. Kathy Lou Schultz... more ... "In the modern vein": Afro-Modernist poetry and literary history. Kathy Lou Schultz, University of Pennsylvania. ... I analyze the vexed relationship between dialect and standard English in the work of James Weldon Johnson, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and WEB Du Bois. ...

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2013

In “Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem” (1951), Langston Hughes writes and unwrites history... more In “Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem” (1951), Langston Hughes writes and unwrites history, reflecting the mobility and stasis, the starts and stops, on the path toward achievement of modern selfhood in a culture determined to infinitely defer African Americans’ freedoms. First published in the February 1951 issue of Crisis, “Prelude” is a 208-line, 38-stanza poem. In Crisis, it ran for four pages (87–90) while in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1995) it runs for six (379–384). Thus, it is not one of the short lyrics to which present-day readers of the canonical Hughes may be accustomed. For example, more than half of the Hughes poems in the second edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2004) are short lyrics from the 1920s—those poems for which Hughes is most well known such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and “Danse Africaine” (1922). However, Hughes’s works that were first published in the 1950s that are collected in the anthology (“Juke Box Love Song,” “Dream Boogie,” “Harlem,” and “Motto”) that appear to be short lyrics as well, are all actually part of Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). Yet there is no indication of that, leading readers to believe that Hughes’s poetics had not shifted in 30 years.

Plume Poetry, Issue #74, September, 2017

Kathy Lou Schultz: Teaching African-American Poetry in the Age of Trump Teaching African American... more Kathy Lou Schultz: Teaching African-American Poetry in the Age of Trump Teaching African American Poetry in the Age of Trump Poetry can't change the world. The world where we witness horrors from the dismissal of every child's right to receive a quality education and live in a safe environment, to white racists toting semi-automatic weapons and the Nazi flag through the streets. The world where we wait to see what will become of any of us with a "pre-existing condition," and pray that a pissing match between two men does not escalate into nuclear warfare. Poetry can't change that. How can poetry even enter into the conversation? My commitment to poetry has evolved over my teaching and writing life. I first "officially" taught poetry in 1994 at San Francisco State University, where I received my MFA. Before that I taught poetry to teen moms while I was in college. I've taught "adult" (i.e. non-traditional) students at Temple University, and high school students at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia and from a KIPP charter school in Texas. I taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where I completed my PhD, and for the last 11 years, I've taught at a large, chronically underfunded public university in Memphis. And despite the fact that the English Department where I work has proven in dollars and cents that it runs in the black-and not in the red (yes, English is a revenue-generating department!) I'm immersed in a culture that tells me that the humanities aren't worth funding. So why teach poetry? What does the study of poetry actually yield? In my years of teaching, I have observed that the study of poetry enables students to develop core abilities that are desperately needed in the age of Trump. These skills include: 1) Critical Literacy: the ability not only to read the wide variety of printed information we're surrounded by, but also to analyze it and form supportable arguments; 2) Knowledge of History: Students must research the historical contexts in which the poems are written and set, as well as the variety of allusions to events, people, texts, songs, etc.; 3) Patience. As my friend, clarinetist Carina Nyberg Washington, pointed out, the beauty of poetry, like the beauty of classical (and other forms of) music is only revealed to those who put in the time and practice to study it; 4) Radical Empathy: especially for those we consider different or "foreign"; and 5) Activation of Imaginative Capabilities: Only if we develop our abilities to imagine positive alternatives to our current destructive policies and behaviors can we begin to create social change. Yes, teaching poetry is crucial in 2017. My students and I laugh together when I tell them that poetry is one of the reasons I get up in the morning. However, this isn't the only reason some think me an unusual case. When people learn that one of my major research and teaching areas is African American literature, particularly poetry, some react with surprise or even suspicion: "How did YOU [a white woman] get interested in THAT [insert various judgments here]?" An administrator even asked me, "Are you actually white?" If I focused my efforts on white women's poetry, what questions would they ask? How about if it were Shakespeare? Because of the reasons underlying such questions about my vocation, my teaching of African American poetry must also involve teaching something about my own race, gender, class and sexual identities, and how my experience and actions both reflect and resist prevailing assumptions. I have rigorously examined my own privilege and disadvantages in an effort to understand stereotypes and truths about white women, so that I may more deeply engage students with the historical meanings assigned to race, class, gender, and sexuality in America. I want students to think about how we got here-the age of Trump-and how we can chart our way toward a more merciful, peaceful place where we might want to live.

Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 3.1 (June 2019). 117-126., 2019

This essay analyzes Claudia Rankine's first book, Nothing in Nature is Private, showing that alth... more This essay analyzes Claudia Rankine's first book, Nothing in Nature is Private, showing that although the book is formally dissimilar to her later work, it includes themes that continue to be foundational to her writing practice. From the title of the first poem, "American Light," in this first book, to the subtitle of her two most recent books of poetry ("An American Lyric") Rankine has dwelt in the history and multiple meanings of the "American." Nothing in Nature is Private allows us to deeply consider a black female subject's relationship to the American landscape, history, and literary lineages. Moreover, this analysis enlarges debates both about how subjectivity is framed and how it is related to poetic form.

from Efforts and Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship (Univ. of Iowa Press)

Building is a Process / Light is an Element: Essays and Excursions for Myung Mi Kim, 2008

Journal of Modern Literature, 2012

This essay analyzes Amiri Baraka's Afro-Modernist epic, Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Song (Djeli Y... more This essay analyzes Amiri Baraka's Afro-Modernist epic, Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Song (Djeli Ya) throughout its composition process, within the contexts of Classical epic traditions, early twentieth-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa. Wise is an Afro-Modernist epic that is unique in several respects: the epic shifts from the individual hero traditionally seen in the epic form to the collective, and displays a transnational, diasporic worldview opposed to a unitary national consciousness. Baraka uses the genre of the epic that at foundation coalesces national identity to question those very foundations. Wise does not follow the traditional narrative of the epic journey; the African American collective is unable to return to a physical location called " home." Instead, Wise improvises a home for the African American collective through the act of performance, creating a jazz text combining poetry, music and visual art.

Contemporary Literature, 2011

and Contemporary Literature's anonymous readers for their generous feedback at various stages of ... more and Contemporary Literature's anonymous readers for their generous feedback at various stages of this project.

Miracle Monocle (Univ. of Louisville), 2018

“Demon on Wheels” (from Mother(g)ood)

A