Read poem here

• Look at the audience for the stage performance depicted in the footage that accompanies Hughes’ poem. Who is the audience for the film? Do you think it is the same audience Hughes addressing in the poem? Justify your response.
  
  
• How does this digital poem’s combination of different audiences create different meanings in the multimodal text?
  
  
• Notice how the music soundtrack at times appear to come from the visual text and at times is overlaid on top of it. When is the music overlay in sync and when not? What meanings are created by the disjunction between sound and the visual content of what’s happening onscreen?
  
  
• What is the effect of the adjustments in the pace of the music soundtrack? How is the filmic pace (including slow motion) support or challenge the musical score? What do you make of the contrast between the 'bluesy' feel of the music and poem content and the upbeat, jazzy mood suggested by the on-stage visuals? How does this contrast illustrate or create new meaning for the poem? Justify your answer.
  
  
• What if this poem were read as a voice-over to images and music drawn from Australian Indigenous rather than African-American content? How would this change the meanings? (Consider the effect of such a textual choice on the last line of the poem: ‘He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.’)

Explore more about poet Langston Hughes here and the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ here.