January 24th Blog

Question 1: How does the use of imagery in "November Cotton Flower" help convey its message to the reader?

When I was reading this poem, one of the first major things that I realized that the language of this poem is extremely contrasting. It begins with bleak imagery of boll-weevils coming to eat the cotton, thus making cotton reaping very difficult. The poem continues on with bleak and dark imagery. The imagery makes the reader feel as though hope and any sign of productivity and life is gone. But all of a sudden, the poem seems to flow into a beautiful imagery of a slave(or what I believe is to be a slave) eye's and the slave is so beautiful that even the old white folk haven't seen such beauty. I like the way this poem "flows" as in I appreciate the effectiveness of how Toomer started bleak and turned the poem into something hopeful.

Question 2: What does the removing of the 'tape' signify in "Her Lips are Copper Wire?"

For the tape, I'm thinking that it represents removing the bonds of slavery. The tape represents a masking of the voice of the enslaved African-American people and the removing of tape the former slaves now receive freedom and freedom of speech. It could also represent African-American's being able to finally remove the barrier between a white and black person couple thus allowing love to shine on like an "incandescent" light bulb without any restrictions to worry about.

-Sean Song

January 19th Blog

All three of these poets used a range of both formal and informal(dialect) styles. By using formal language, these African-American poets were able to appeal not only to the white's in America, but I also believe that it brought them international fame. By using the formal style, white Americans were able to relate and read the poems without feeling as though it was written by an African-American, thus this could appeal to a lot of whites due to the racism back then. Even though the poems were written in formal style, the poets were still able to convey the message of the struggles of being an African-American and in some sense they were able to convey this message to the white's of America to show them how it was to be an African-American. An advantage of using informal(dialect) language is obvious, to appeal to the African-Americans. By using informal language, it allows African-Americans to relate very closely to the poems because a lot of the poems made by these poets were about the struggles of being an African American. I also believe that these informal poems could of reached the hands of the whites of America. And if the poems did, then the white Americans could really get a grasp of how Africans would converse without any white influence. I also believe poems conveyed in informal tone has a deeper impact on the reader. For me, as I read the informal tone poems I can picture the author speaking to me in that way, thus I believe it has a deeper and more meaningful impact on the reader.

-Sean Song