comps > poems/plays > Flashcards
poems/plays Flashcards
Tears
Maya Angelou
We Saw Beyond Our Seeming
Maya Angelou
My Guilt
Maya Angelou
Senses of Insecurity
Maya Angelou
Wonder
Maya Angelou
Child Dead in Old Seas
Maya Angelou
Elegy
Maya Angelou
The Lesson
Maya Angelou
Kitchenette Building
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Mother
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Bean Eaters
Gwendolyn Brooks
We Real Cool
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmitt Till
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Crazy Women
Gwendolyn Brooks
To be in Love
Gwendolyn Brooks
As a Human Being
Jericho Brown
Hero
Jericho Brown
Bullet Points
Jericho Brown
Duplex
Jericho Brown
After Avery R. Young
Jericho Brown
Riddle
Jericho Brown
Stand
Jericho Brown
Weary Blues
Langston Hughes
One way Ticket
Langston Hughes
Mother to Son
Langston Hughes
I, Too
Langston Hughes
Georgia Dusk
Langston Hughes
Lunch in a Jim Crow Car
Langston Hughes
Africa
Langston Hughes
Harlem
Langston Hughes
Poem About My Rights
June Jordan
Case in Point
June Jordan
What Would I Do White
June Jordan
Meta-Rhetoric
June Jordan
Poem for a Young Poet
June Jordan
One Time Tanka
June Jordan
These Poems
June Jordan
Notes On Tears
About a dream dying
Connect to Hughes
Worn-through soul
“Blue” farewell
Crystal rags / viscous tatters
Crystal makes one think of beauty, which conflicts with ‘rags” and “vicious tatters”
Notes on We Saw Beyond Our Seeming
Representation of violence
Not always seen in the art forms
Like the older plays
“We aided in the killing”
Who is the “we” in question?
“Beyond our seeming”
What is “seeming”?
Notes on My Guilt
“Slavery’s chains too long” → 1st stanza about slavery
Lasted too long
Moves on to some influential figures/Civil Rights movement figures
Guilt over being alive still and not being dead
Reference to lynching
“I” take to dying like a man
Dies with dignity and pride / not screaming
Notes on Senses of Insecurity
“Dream was true” → another connection to Langston Hughes I could make
How dangerous love can be
“Dared” the cost
Ode with no meter
Only thing the speaker is sure about is their lover
Not sure if fact/fiction is true
Consider: it’s called “Senses of insecurity”
How does insecurity play into love here?
Notes on Wonder
Line breaks makes you read slowly
Basically each stanza is a sentence
The second stanza is a question but not phrased as such
How does time function?
Proximity?
Who is more dead?
Notes on Child Dead in Old Series
About children lost in the Middle Passage
“Rippled surface of our grave”
“Wrapped in the entrails of the whales”
Look at how the lines are broken into sentences/capitalization
“Deep dirges moan” → “Your song floats to me”
From the sound of the slave ships to the memory of the past
“Childhood’s absence” → sign our speaker is a child
Notes on Elegy
About death once more (obviously)
Life comes from death
Before, we had children buried under the waves and now we have a “mother” like figure buried under the soil
We grow from our ancestors
We grow from loss
Consider: “grow” always being its own line
Notes on the Lesson
NOTES:
Every day a little death
We live despite pain and unpleasantries
“Rotting flesh and worms do not convince me against the challenge”
“Cold defeat live deep in the lines along my face” → they wear their age/suffering
Notes on Kitchenette Building
About Black Americans in the 1940’s
Forced into tight housing units called “kitchenettes”
Conflict between escaping poverty / exhausting day to day demands of poverty
Recurring theme of “dream”
Connect to Hughes and Angelou
Can dreams survive in this kind of climate?
Inescapable cycle of poverty
Notes on The Mother
Scuttle off” → scuttle can mean to deliberately sink a boat
About the children who are never born
At one point tries to claim they are never made, but then says that’s faulty
History: Brooks born in Illinois in 1917
Abortion made illegal in Illinois in 1867
Roe v Wade in 1973
About loss/possibility
Mother faintly knew the aborted babies / loved them all
Notes on The Bean Eaters
About an ordinary poor couple
Mostly good
Don’t have much
“Old yellowed pair”
They’re well weathered
Couple remembers the past
Keeps the twinkle in their eyes
We Real Cool
About some delinquents
Left school
Lurk late
Sing sin
Will likely die young
Notes on The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till
Many broken lines
Like the broken body of Emmett Till
Many unfinished sentences spilling onwards
Like the unfinished life of Emmett Till
“Chaos in windy grays”
Is anything black and white?
“Red” prairie → red hot
Notes on The Crazy Women
Refuses to conform to happiness
Won’t sing in may because the songs are happy
Will sing in November when it’s fall/gloomy/gray
Someone who is expressing their true/pure emotions and not what people want
Even if it brands them as crazy
Notes on To Be In Love
Freedom is not free when you’re in love
“A ghastly freedom”
Love is painful, but there is beauty in pain
“You are the beautiful half of a golden hurt”
“Your arms are water” → love is so all encompassing that you lose your solidity
Notes on As a Human Being
About familial violence
A son has scarred his abusive father
The mother sits by the father despite his abuse
Safe to say she chooses him over the son?
He is now alone
“Nobody’s got to love you”
Is solitude what makes him realize himself as a human?
Or is it freedom from attachments?
Notes on Hero
Again about the mother not connecting with her children
Has multiple sons all fighting for her attention
She hits them
Doesn’t like it?
Cries when she whips the speaker
Had abortions but the speaker was somehow born
Now she’s a grandmother
Kisses the grandkids
Doesn’t sound like she kissed her own kids
Clear complicated feelings over his mother
But it’s titled “Hero” and the word comes up at the end
Unpack that
Notes on Bullet Points
I will not kill myself → I will not give up
Will not let the cops take him
About police brutality
If he is dead near a cop, the cop killed him
At the same time, he will not kill himself via cop
“A city can pay a mother to stop crying”
His mother cried when she whipped him as well
How will he die?
Choking on meat → would denote doing well (unlike the Bean Eaters)
Freezing to death → poor
Notes on Duplex (I)
Duplex = housing unit
A poem is a gesture towards home
Common themes emerge
The abusive father
The weeping mother
Are they synonymous with the idea of home?
Notes on After Avery R. Young
Avery R. Young → visual artist
Blk → a stricture that mimics erasure or minimization
The speaker inhabits not a physical space, but an aesthetic one, constituted by limitation
Consider: the way the “Blk mind is a continuous mind” is not a continuous line
You can’t always see Black but it always perseveres
Notes on Riddle
Connect to Brooks poem on Emmett Till
We do not know the history of the nation in ourselves
We’re detached from our history/where we come from
Because we don’t know what we believe
How much does it cost to hold your breath underwater?
Makes me think of Angelou’s dead children in the sea
We buy things that should be free
Sound of silence
Notes on Stand
Peace or guns
We cannot have both
Someone is always dying
Does this tarnish beautiful moments like making love?
“I thought of holding you as a political act” → bodies are warped
Criminalized/politicized
“May as well have held myself” → Being Black is as taboo as being gay
Notes on Weary Blues
Includes dialogue/lyrics
About the weary blues
Pain/power of Black art
There’s no satisfaction
A longing for death
Notes on One Way Ticket
Narrator is moving North or West
Done with the injustices of the South
About the Great Migration
Notes on Mother to Son
Mother speaking to son
Life has been hard for her
She’s climbing continuously
But the stairs aren’t crystal/beautiful
Staircase → metaphor to depict racism/difficulties/dangers one faces in life
Notes on I, Too
All people are equal
Should have a place at the table
Black is beautiful
Notes on Georgia Dusk
Land of the South → a concubine
Influence of slavery on newly freed America
About sorrow
Notes on Lunch in a Jim Crow Car
About biding time until segregation
Ride the cart until it’s time
Notes on Africa
The re-awakening of Africa?
Multi-layered and complex
Notes on Harlem
The poem from Raisin in the Sun
About dreams/what happens to them when they’re not actualized
A raisin in the sun → tiny thing someone may experience
Poem speculates on the question it asks
Dreams here are not these overexposed things per se but are imagined to be like them and subject to the same force
They are both visceral and vulnerable, and altogether too much.
Dreams, like history, hurt.
By implication, they demand care—and all the work that care entails.
Notes on Poem About my Rights
Free-verse
About misogyny, sexism, aftereffects of colonialism
How rape culture affects women of color
Prevalence of victim blaming
Patrice Lumumba → connection to Funnyhouse of a Negro
Reclamation of the name/self
Ability to stand against violence
Battle cry almost
Notes on Case in Point
Again about rape
More legal/technical
The patriarchy’s depravity uniquely cripples women
Especially women with intersectional identities
Rape is a case in point that proves that the patriarchy brutally silences women.
“there is no silence peculiar / to the female” → conversational tone
Show an extreme scene of violence
Nonchalance → the narrator comes across as non-threatening
Level headed despite explaining violence
“I was raped for the second / time in my life the first occasion / being a whiteman and the most recent / situation being a blackman actually / head of the local NAACP”
No punctuation
Second one almost seems like an afterthought
There’s no silence peculiar to the female → then shows how that’s wrong
Notes on What Would I Do White
Speaker wonders what it would be like to be white
None of the examples are very flattering to white people
They can do “nothing” and that’s enough
A level of carelessness in their existence
Notes on Meta-Rhetoric
Longing
A desire to be close
Queer
Notes on Poem For a Young Poet
Longing for human connection
Repeated emphasis on “face”
Notes on One Time Tanka
Repeated use of “black and blue”
About police brutality and racism
Notes on These Poems
Things I do in the dark → a collection title
“I am a stranger/learning to worship the strangers/around me” → similar to Poem for a Poet / looking at faces / in the eyes of others
Blue Bloods
Georgia Douglas Johnson - two women are raped by the same white man and realize their kids are about to get married
It’s the Black women that have got to protect their men from the white man by not tellin’ on him
Plumes
Georgia Douglas Perkins - Women doesn’t know if she should spend $50 on her daughter’s operation or her funeral
Safe, a play on lynching
Georgia Douglas Perkins - Mom kills baby to keep it safe from lynchers
Stragglers in the Dust
May Miller - Black mom wonders if her son is in the tomb of the unknown soldier
Uses white characters
It’s Morning
Shirley Graham Du Bois - Young mother contemplates killing daughter on eve of emancipation so she won’t be sold to a distant master
Done as a Greek tragedy with the murder off stage
Trouble in Mind
Alice Childress - a workplace comedy about the tensions between Black and white actors working on a new place
Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White
Alice Childress - a devoted couple’s caustic confrontations with anti-miscegenation laws, vicious family racism, community disapproval and finally deadly disease and their own long-buried feelings
White husband injured
About miscegenation
