In Honor of Black History Month February 4 2022

In honor of Black History Month I decided to write about poet Georgia Douglas Johnson and Alice Dunbar Nelson because they were colleagues with different life histories but shared poems about their lives. The image below is of a grindstone, the means of making flour or a metaphor for work, and they share work imagery in their poems and share the frustration of working at work that seems beside the point. Both writers eventually write about racism, but their first frustration stemmed from their role as a woman. I found poems by both women in "Great Poems by American Women".

Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem, "My Little Dreams," uses language that conveys the sense of a woman wrapping up her embroidery or crochet for the night and putting it away, while talking about her dreams. Looking at other of her poems, she writes about a child and her worries for it, so the dreams could be construed to be about having a child but more likely wanting to write and being discouraged as a woman, a writer, and a black woman. Her poem is quite short, two stanzas of four lines with the second and fourth line of each stanza rhyming.

Alice Dunbar Nelson's poem, "I Sit and Sew," is a longer poem and dwells on the frustration of a woman sewing while the men are off at war. Her poem is written as three stanzas of seven lines. Each stanza had six lines with paired rhymes followed by a one-line refrain. It is a good poem to compare with Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem because both show frustration in different ways while doing similar tasks. 

Writing Assignment: Write about a task that frustrates you and show the action of the task in the poem. This is a good way to show emotion, transferring it to a task.

​Both women were leaders in the literary community and shared the bond of a shared workshop.