Video Blues

From the title “Video Blues,” Salter clearly invokes the blues tradition, and an understanding of the blues tradition provides a deeper understanding of the poem itself. Beginning as a musical tradition, blues emerged after the Civil War as formerly enslaved African Americans migrated north. The roots of blues music can be found in a combination of field songs, church music, and elements of African rhythms. Rhyme, repetition, and rhythm are crucial elements of blues, as many songs were performed rhythmically while working. Thematically, blues songs are often about longing for home, longing for a loved one, hardship, and survival.

Blues became firmly entrenched as a formal poetic tradition in the United States during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, especially with the publication of Langston Hughes’s first book, The Weary Blues, in 1926. While there is much variation in blues poetry, certain defining characteristics emerged. Much like its musical roots, blues poetry typically addresses topics of love, struggle, and despair. It often adheres to a form of three-line stanzas “in which a statement is made in the first line, a variation is given in the second line, and an ironic alternative is declared in the third line” (“Blues Poem.” Poets.org, 2019). Rhyme, repetition, and rhythm are also hallmark characteristics, as well as “resilience in the face of hardship” (“Blues Poem”). Salter, being a poet drawn to formal constraints, utilizes several of these conventional blues elements in “Video Blues”: clear rhyme, repetition, and subject matter that, while presented in a humorous, sardonic tone, suggests a marriage struggling with more than just video rentals.

Within the context of A Kiss in Space, the collection in which “Video Blues” was published, the decision to include a blues poem is not surprising. The collection thematically focuses on the human search for knowledge and suggests that this journey moves society toward an uncertain future. The poem itself demonstrates this as the repetition keeps circling back to the problem at hand with no apparent resolution. Each stanza provides more knowledge, yet the future of the marriage remains uncertain. The formal elements of a blues poem provide Salter with a perfect vehicle for expressing a nuanced and emotionally complex moment of longing, intimacy, and resilience.