Close Reading–Summer Storm Dana Gioia’s Summer Storm, published in 2001, is a poem about two people who met at a wedding and connected briefly on a patio during a storm, but never spoke again. The connection impacted the narrator so deeply that despite twenty years having passed, the memory of the connection still lingers loudly […]
This week I felt very inspired by “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” by Adrienne Rich. The poem is short and sweet yet encompasses so many ideas and feelings within its three stanzas. I want to start by analyzing the word choices Rich uses. Her word choice draws out contrasting characteristics between the fragile Aunt Jennifer and her […]
Sonia uses diction very purposefully throughout the poem “blk / rhetoric.” She creates a poem that is based on “the Black condition as I see it” (66). Using her preface of the poems and pairing that with how she leaves out letters in black, using the abbreviation for this every time she references the word […]
In Lexi Rudnitsky’s article “The “Power” and “Sequelae” of Audre Lorde’s Syntactical Strategies,” Rudnitsky examines the importance Lorde placed not only on words and language but also the form and medium of language. Rudnitsky asserts that “Lorde privileged poetry over other forms of expression because she believed that poetry alone had the ability to create […]
According to many critics and writers, Audre Lorde had many titles and a place in literary history. In the article “Audre Lorde: Influence, Sisterhood, Legacy,” authors Eve Oishi and Jennifer Bowen focus on all the people that Lorde was during her life. Poetry cannot exist without poets, and different schools of poetry grew around these […]
Carolyn Rodger’s How I Got Ovah fuses projective poetics with the Black Arts Movement aesthetics. Charles Olson, in his manifesto Projective Verse, argues that, in poetry, there is no need for an appeal to the senses because the reader should be propelled by the energy of the breath, which is governed by syllables and lines. […]
Author Margaret Kissam Morris refers to the many identifying descriptors Audre Lorde claimed over the course of a prolific lifespan and likens them as having a shared unity in her article “Audre Lorde: Textual Authority and the Embodied Self.” These monikers find commonality as they share the makeup of Lorde, and Morris likens this to “Rosi […]
FOR THE CONSIDERATION OF POETS where is the poetry of resistance, the poetry of honorable defianceunafraid of lies from career politicians and business men,not respectful of journalist who writeofficial speak void of educated thoughtwithout double search or sub surface questionsthat war talk demands?where is the poetry of doubt and suspicionnot in the service of the […]
The poems of the Black Arts Movement seem to be a stark contrast from last week’s confessional poetry. More specific and based on personal experiences during a certain time period, I found these poems to be more grounded or “concrete”. I decided to do a close reading of one of Gwendolyn Brooks poems, choosing “We […]
In the article, “The Social Background of the Black Arts Movement,” author Larry Neal, co-editor of Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Amiri Baraka, explores what was happening in society surrounding the Black Arts Movement. He begins by noting that Philadelphia riots, Harlem riots, and the Bay of Pigs. Civil Rights Movement was […]