PI chose James Weldon Johnson as my poet for the 10th day in honor of Black History Month. He was a civil rights advocate and helped build the Harlem Renaissance. One of the strong features of James Weldon Johnson's work is it's musicality, the sense that just reading it is like a song. That's why I chose the black castanets below, they offer rhythm to any music or dance and are helpful and low-cost way to establish a beat while you write or read or edit your poems.
Rather than talk about the most famous poem of his work known as the black national anthem or "Lift Every Voice and Sing" I chose another of his poems, "Art Versus Trade" on the Poetry Foundation website which also has a biography along with the one found if you click the first mention of his name. "Art Versus Trade" is something every artist must face and every poet. It's a poem that shares the same style that is used by Ice-T or Ice Cube with paired lines of rhymes. Except he chose to break the singsongness of paired rhymes with one line that doesn't rhyme, the last line of the first stanza. It looks like the poem will have five-line stanzas, except he merges two stanzas together adding additional lines in order to make it sound chatty. He then uses three pairs of rhymed lines followed by an additional line.
One of the rules poets can break is the format of the stanza. Traditionally, poets wrote to form, here the poet wrote to keep the song and to remain on topic with what he wishes to say. His life ended just as the Great Depression hit, so perhaps the bad times he speaks of reflect that time period. The two lines:
"Oh, that mankind had less of Brain and more of Heart,
Oh, that the world had less of Trade and more of Art;"
appear in the last stanza, showing almost hope despite the octopus crushing the throat of poor art. These lines serve as a turning point for the poem that ties back to the first stanza, before going back to being bleak. Contrast it with the joy in the video below.
Assignment: Write a poem about the business of poetry, whatever you have learned about the struggle between work and art or music.
Here's a video of Ray Charles performing James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
One of the rules poets can break is the format of the stanza. Traditionally, poets wrote to form, here the poet wrote to keep the song and to remain on topic with what he wishes to say. His life ended just as the Great Depression hit, so perhaps the bad times he speaks of reflect that time period. The two lines:
"Oh, that mankind had less of Brain and more of Heart,
Oh, that the world had less of Trade and more of Art;"
appear in the last stanza, showing almost hope despite the octopus crushing the throat of poor art. These lines serve as a turning point for the poem that ties back to the first stanza, before going back to being bleak. Contrast it with the joy in the video below.
Assignment: Write a poem about the business of poetry, whatever you have learned about the struggle between work and art or music.
Here's a video of Ray Charles performing James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
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