Category: Stanza

In Honor of Black Poetry Month, February 9, 2022

2/22/2022

For a black poet for the letter "i", I needed to go to the "Anthology of Rap" edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew Dubois. Rap is poetry backed by a lot of music or little bit and is quite contemporary, two examples provided are work by rappers Ice-T and Ice Cube. The streets that appear in both rappers music are much gritter than the photography below of a New York City intersection. They are places where people trade drugs and use guns. Rap tends to be much more profitable than poetry because of the music business and people's desire to connect and dance.

Both rappers use pairs of rhymed lyrics in long stanzas of song. Both are narrative poets, they tell a story of events that continue for the duration of the poem. I will discuss Ice-T's rap "6 'N the Morning" while my other option was Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" that I provided below in Youtube format. This latter rap has an element of humor because it ends with a famous "Not" meaning he laughs at the very idea of his poem.

Ice-T's rap "6 'N the Morning" is very long, separated by the use of Word to mark changes in the story. His rap starts vividly with action everyone can relate to "Fresh Adidas squeak across the bedroom floor, out my back window I make my escape, Didn't even get a chance to grab my old school tape" to the event of having the police arrive at his home. Most of the events are about being out on the street which many in the poetry world could not relate to: "Didn't want trouble, but the shit must fly, squabbled with this sucker, shanked him in the eye." Part of his appeal is the series of events, getting paid lots of money, getting dressed up, making love, escaping the cops, which can be as exciting as a movie, thus narrative poetry.

Writing Assignment: Write a narrative poem with pairs of rhymed lines making your day seem exciting

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In Honor of Black History Month February 8 2022

2/22/2022

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I'm behind on writing about a African/Black Poet for Black History Month since I took off a week and went to Iceland for Valentine's Day. However, there are many great African/Black Poet's deserving attention so I will try to catch up in the next days. For the eighth poet, I have chosen Edil Hassan's chapbook "Dugsi Girl" from the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Set. Dugsi is a school to learn the Koran. That is why I have picked a photo below of a minaret and other structures from a Mosque in Egypt to help illustrate.

Dugsi girl contains a lot of poems that address a young girl's desire. It is rich with details about living in Somalia, in Morocco as a refugee and in Vermont where Edil Hassan attended college. An example of Edil Hassan's poetry is found online at Poetry Foundation titled Ghazal. Ghazal shows a mix of American style simplification in the syntax of the poem and rich Arab details. It is written as a series of two-line stanzas but isn't formalized as a ghazal. It doesn't mar the meaning in any fashion but gives the reader an idea about how her poetry is constructed. In Dugsi Girl, she maintains more formal meter but the song like quality of both comes through as the poetry is read aloud.

My favorite of the chapbook is "Febbraio 1986", a poem about watching her mother with a man who isn't her father because it is before her mother marries. The experience must have been surprising for a young girl, but she follows along in the sensuality her mother demonstrates with the man, rather than evaluate or judge what is happening. An example stanza is as follows:
Lately your mother catches mouthfuls of frankincense.
Crushes cinnamon bark between her teeth, her breath

This ability to set aside her immediate emotions and follow others enriches her poetry. This ability to play with time and place is why one of her poems is titled "Dugsi Girl versus Time Travel". She often combines what she is feeling in a given moment, to some other occasion in another place. I expect to see her write much more poetry in the future with equal depth and richness of experience.

Writing Assignment: Write about watching your mother using two line stanzas

I've included a Youtube of a Somalian girl dancing after attending school to learn the Koran, Dugsi below to get an idea of the culture--clothing, music, etc.

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In Honor of Black History Month February 6 2022

2/9/2022

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In honor of Black History Month February 6, 2022 I chose to write about Mary Weston Fordham who lived during the reconstruction era following the Civil War, read her biography.

The image below was the closest photo I have of washer woman since I will write about Mary Weston Fordham's poem "The Washer Woman". The photo below was a carving in jade shown at the Brazil National Museum in Rio de Janeiros, Brazil. I'm not sure what it is meant to convey, maybe a stylized frog, but the posture is similar to a woman scrubbing clothing in a river that I watched in Belize, scrubbing the clothing with rocks.

Mary Weston Fordham's poem "The Washer Woman" appears in her collection of 66 poems titled Magnolia Leaves. The poem is written as seven stanzas of eight lines, with lines two and four and six and eight rhyming in each stanza. What is apparent from the poem is that Mary Weston Fordham had washed clothing and sympathized with the woman she was memorializing.

In the poem, she explicitly cites physical parts of the body affected by scrubbing clothing, the hands, the back, the arms, the legs, and the motion and the action and the sound. She repeats these traits to emphasize their tiredness when the poem makes a turn to God. Her glorifying Sunday shows how precious a day of rest could be and her homage to God for this break is heartfelt.

Writing Assignment: Write about a job that you did repetitively until exhausted.

See a modern poem about Washer Women below:

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In Honor of Black History Month February 4 2022

2/4/2022

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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.

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In Honor of Black History Month February 3 2022

2/3/2022

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In honor of Black History Month February 3 2022, I have chosen poet James Edwin Campbell who is known for popularizing southern black American dialect known as Gullah in his poems. Use of dialect in poems was a popular way to show the common man at work, play or life and poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg continued the tradition Campbell started.

During James Edwin Campbell's life, the US was in a period of building population, states, and expanding westward while dealing with reconstruction issues post-Civil War.

At My Poetic Side there are many examples of James Edwin Campbell's dialect poems, but I would like to discuss "Mors et Vita" which I first read in the Dover Thrift Collection of African American Poetry. "Mors et Vita" is a simple poem of two stanzas of matching sets of lines. There are five lines that match in both stanzas but the last stanza has a final line that some might say he should have cut his darling. The last line is really optional but helps to cut the sing song nature of the poem and end triumphantly with a discovery.

Song is the reason I chose to discuss "Mors et Vita" because many of James Edwin Campbell's poems could be sung and are full of joy. It is the reason he was very popular, because if you can sing a poem, it can be used to entertain. In the growing Midwest, entertainment was much appreciated as the distances can be far between households.

His use of rhyme is inconsistent and appears in different lines, but the listener can perceive the rhyme as it is read. The rhythm combined with the rhyme makes it like a song.

What I like about James Edwin Campbell's story is his apparent education, success, broad appeal and happiness. His poem "A Memory Tone" could be about meeting his wife.

Writing Assignment: Write a Poem with Two Stanzas of Five Lines that refer to different objects in each line, the second poem using the objects in a different manner. Make it a rhyming poem. How does it feel to read this poem?

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Working on my ninth book, this one on Africa

In Honor of Black Poetry Month, February 9, 2022

In Honor of Black History Month February 8 2022

In Honor of Black History Month February 6 2022

In Honor of Black History Month February 4 2022

In Honor of Black History Month February 3 2022

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