ENG 1102 April 10th

My group is doing the poem Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa. Our idea is to have a video with a mixture of clips of the Vietnam War, pictures of soldiers and the war, and more pictures of people at the Vietnam Memorial. The music for the video was found by group member Brittany. Currently all members of our group are sending these pictures and video clips to Stephen as he has taken upon himself to compile these video clips and pictures into a video using his software skills. For the voice of who will read the poem, we have not decided. We are leaning more towards having Stephen or myself to read the poem in the video. But if all fails we will use Yusef Komunyakaa's voice.

-Sean

March 1, 2012 Blog

The most effective poet to me is Julian Curry. Before even looking at the rest of the artists I thought I would like Dave Chappelle's act the best and to tell you the truth I was a bit disappointed. But after listening to a few more poets I finally ended up with Julian Curry's. I was immediately captured by his performance. He effectively gets the audience involved quickly and has everyone paying attention to him. Then he continues his poem(which is more serious than I thought) and it was amazing. His poem was very powerful, talking about a subject that is sensitive to many people, but he fully embraces the topic and he has his audience locked in. I think the fact that he looks at the audience and uses his hands to point and make motions really helps get his point across. His voice intonation change makes the poem very powerful, enunciating words that help get his point across.

-Sean Song

******P.S. A very, very good song by Lupe Fiasco! Talks about why he used to not like rap because of what it seemed to represent.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI6iZJOntY8 ********

P.P.S. or is is P.S.S..... idk.. BUT here is another Lupe Fiasco song! One of my favorite rappers and one of my favorite songs! It's a very relaxing song. I like to chill out with some friends and have this song in the bg.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDuNxl_GtqY

February 20, 2012 Blog

Baraka's poems are extremely intense and everyone of them have the strong feel of black pride and definitely have the same feeling and anger from his essays. It seems like whenever Baraka has a chance to elevate black culture he does and he often puts down white's in his poems or hints at the fact that African-Americans are superior to the whites. In his poem, "Ka' Ba'" he does just that. Throughout the poem Baraka talks about the 'Black Family' needing to rise up and gain power.

-Sean Song

February 14th, 2012 Blog

My favorite poem from the reading for today is "The Progress." I found this poem really interesting. I'm not going to lie, I really like this poem because of the fact that it seems like a slight protest against the government. It gives imagery of many people, especially imagery of white people(it's the feeling I get from reading the poem), being happy being slavery is over and everyone is watching the president's speech being all patriotic and such. BUT, Brooks still shows that the status of the black man hasn't changed. It still is pretty much slavery except now the blacks don't work for free. They are consistently living in fear just like they have when they were slaves.... nothing has really changed for them.

I've noticed something about the poems I find interesting in this class. I've seen to taking a liking to all of the protest poems we have read. It's something about them that shows that humanity will not stand for injustice and people will be willing to keep fighting for what they believe is right.

-Sean Song

February 9th, 2012

I'm not going to lie, when first reading Brook's poems I really had a hard time deciphering what she was saying in her poems. But, as I continued to read, her messages became a little clearer.

Obviously her poems are radically different from the previous poems we have been reading. The past poems dealt with a lot of oppression against the black man by the whites, but Brook's poems also deal with oppression and with the challenges of being a woman in America. She deals with, what many would consider girly thing such as, love. Love seems to be a re-occurring theme throughout her poems. For example, in her poem "Ballad of Pearl May Lee," she talks about how the black man she was in a relationship with, raping a white women and how he eventually got lynched. She seems very bitter about him cheating on her and she seems satisfied that he did die. But at the same time she is able to show the readers the hate against blacks by describing how the man got lynched and the noises that he made. By doing so she is able to show the horrors of extreme racial prejudice and the struggles of being a black woman in America.

-Sean Song

February 2, 2012 Blog

Songs Listened to: Louis Armstrong - What a Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong - When You're Smiling, Duke Ellington - It Don't Mean a Thing.

While reading Hughes' poems, I feel as though his poems are structured purposefully to have the reader immediately
read his poems in a rhythm, making it obvious that Hughes' was heavily influenced by Jazz and Blues music. For example, Hughes' poem "Song for a Dark Girl" show explicitly how Hughes' writes his poems with a major hints of jazz influence because of how the poem gives off a "jazzy" feel to it. It feels as though "Song for a Dark Girl" could be mistaken for lyrics to a blues song because of the rhyme scheme. One example I think is what makes Hughes' poems so close to jazz is how in jazz, many of the jazz singers use stops at the end of every line, just as in Hughes' poems.

With this influence of jazz in Hughes' poems, I believe it gives him a uniqueness that many other poets can not match. His poems have the feel and rhythm of a jazz song and meanings of a deep, thoughtful poem.

-Sean Song

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