Above: Langston Hughes signs autographs after a reading. Image via Washington Area Spark’s Flickr (Creative Commons).

As long as I live, I’ll never forget reading the poetry of Langston Hughes in my sophomore year in high school. The words seemed to jump off the page in my American lit. anthology. His marriage of literature and music danced on the page and in my mind. The blues were literary! I was hooked. In the college years that followed, I would play hooky by finding old first editions in the University of California libraries and poring over them again and again, even transcribing some of the poems to better understand their prosody. And prosody — versification, metrics are synonyms — would become my focus during grad school.

But even more profound than the poetry’s effect was the collision between me and Hughes’ autobiography The Big Sea.

“Life is a big sea full of many fish,” he wrote. “I let down my nets and pulled. I’m still pulling.”

From his tales of Paris to his journey to Italy, the words felt like that gulp of fresh air you take halfway through a long run, filling your brain with blood and your veins with energy.

I knew that I longed to escape my life, to escape my hometown. And Hughes’ big sea called to me, pulled at me, nagged at me.

Some 40 years later, I’m glad I listened to and heeded that calling. I can’t wait for my children to be old enough to read and appreciate this book. And I highly recommend it to you.

Over the course of creative life, I’ve set Langston Hughes to music; I’ve thrown Langston Hughes reading parties (Sean, remember???!!!); and I’ve returned over and over again to the poetry and prose when I needed that gulp of fresh air to keep me going.

At my funeral, I hope someone will read the lines: “Life is a big sea full of many fish. He let down his nets and pulled.”

Happy Black History Month!