Working Title — Black Lives Matter: The Extension of Political Poetry in the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance Revealing American Resistance to the Diversity of Black Lives Through several centuries, poetry has held a position in America as an agent of social change, a medium of choice for the rebel, the activist. Poets […]
Author Archive | anpilson
“Round Eyes” — Response to Janice Mirikitani’s “Round Eyes”
This poem is in response to Janice Mirikitani’s “Round Eyes” poem and also inspired by something another MFA student said about girls in Korea. He said there was a specific face that Korean girls will try to achieve through plastic surgery and that these procedures are highly common, often given as graduation gifts or […]
Final Project Musings and To-Read List
For my paper, I’m trying to focus on investigating the idea of “double-consciousness,” racial authenticity, and identity in African-American poetics across the 20th century and into the 21st century. I want to trace how race has been poeticized and politicized through the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and today with a resurgence of racial […]
Pink-Collar Poetic Resistance and A Day Without Women
Karen Kovacik describes in “Between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Lyric: The Poetry of Pink-Collar Resistance” how a category of female poets has been largely unnamed and thus, ignored because of their refusal to restrict their writing to any one category. Kovacik explains that a “group of working-class writers who borrow frequently from the aesthetic approaches of both […]
Race in Poetry: A Creative Imitation and Experiment of Racial Bias
I Am a White Woman I am a white woman the sound of my speech some distant crescendo of laughs is written in a minor key and I can be heard laughing in the light Can be heard […]
Anne Sexton’s Public Body in “Wanting to Die”: Making the Internal External
The confessional nature of Anne Sexton’s “Wanting to Die” makes the internal external, and involves an exploration of the personal body as an object of public study rather than an object of privacy. The body becomes a subject of study in the first stanza when the speaker addresses an unnamed “you” who has asked a […]
“Donald Trump claims voter fraud!” After Frank O’Hara’s “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]”
Donald Trump claims voter fraud! Donald Trump claims voter fraud! I was scrolling through Facebook avoiding all the things I’d promised to do and refused to begin and you said I should and that it wasn’t that much but you aren’t the one who has to do them so I wasn’t in much of […]
Jazz Breath: How Jazz Influenced Beat Poetics
Culturally, jazz and Beats are often linked through a variety of similar characteristics, but the influence jazz had on Beat poetry cannot be overstated. Beat poets were overwhelmingly influenced by moves made by jazz musicians in the 1940s and ‘50s. Aspects of jazz are easily identifiable within Beat poetics: the focus on the breath of […]
Dembo’s Search for The Objectivists’ Form
L.S. Dembo, in “Louis Zukofsky: Objectivist Poetics and the Quest for Form,” provides an explanation of the objectivists during the modernist period and how their poetic philosophies was also a “quest for form.” Dembo opens with a brief summary on the Objectivists poets, focusing mainly on Louis Zukofsky and his place within, or at the […]
Langston Hughes: The Racial Mountain and the Racial River
Within Langston Hughes’s essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes confronts the divisive question of Negro artists’ aesthetics during the Harlem Renaissance. There were two main camps in terms of content and portrayal of the Negro. Hughes was in the faction that believed the artist had the right to depict Negroes in both […]