Countee Cullen

Incident

BY COUNTEE CULLEN

Once riding in old Baltimore,   

   Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,   

I saw a Baltimorean

   Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,

   And he was no whit bigger,

And so I smiled, but he poked out

   His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore

   From May until December;

Of all the things that happened there

   That’s all that I remember.

Exploration Of The Text

1.    The nature of the interactions between both of them is mutually felt awkward with each other. this is due the differences of skin color has been applied to them since childhood. This is called Racism. 
2.    The speaker remember nothing because he was only a little kid which is age only eight years old and the speaker also stayed at there for a short period which is from May until December.

The Reading / Writing Connection

1.    When I was in Secondary school , I was experienced prejudice in netball team election. They were biased to their ex- teammate rather than new players. They were always  see their ex - teammate advanced more than us which is the new players. Fortunately , I was selected and be their teammate until now.

Ideas For Writing

1.   The form and Rhyme add to this poem is ABCB. A figurative language that was used was foreshadowing.  Example: The title of the poem tells us that something is going to happen during the poem that was not positive.

All Things Not Considered
By Naomi Shihab Nye

You cannot stitch the breath
back into this boy.

A brother and sister were playing with toys
when their room exploded.

In what language
is this holy?

The Jewish boys killed in the cave
were skipping school, having an adventure.

Asel Asleh, Palestinian, age 17, believed in the field
beyond right and wrong where people came together

to talk. He kneeled to help someone else
stand up before he was shot.

If this is holy,
could we have some new religions please?

Mohammed al-Durra huddled against his father
in the street, terrified. The whole world saw him die.

An Arab father on crutches burying his 4 month girl weeps,
“I spit in the face of this ugly world.”

*

Most of us would take our children over land.
We would walk in the fields forever homeless
with our children,
huddle under cliffs, eat crumbs and berries,
to keep our children.
This is what we say from a distance
because we can say whatever we want.

*

No one was right.
Everyone was wrong.
What if they’d get together
and say that?
At a certain point
the flawed narrator wins.

People made mistakes for decades.
Everyone hurt in similar ways
at different times.
Some picked up guns because guns were given.
If they were holy it was okay to use guns.
Some picked up stones because they had them.
They had millions of them.
They might have picked up turnip roots
or olive pits.
Picking up things to throw and shoot:
at the same time people were studying history,
going to school.

*

The curl of a baby’s graceful ear.

The calm of a bucket
waiting for water.

Orchards of the old Arab men
who knew each tree.

Jewish and Arab women
standing silently together.

Generations of black.

Are people the only holy land?

First Explication and notes

When I first read “All Things Not Considered”, one verse stood out from the rest. I find it addresses the issue of viewing conflicts from both sides very well and more to explores the flaws of religion. The poem starts out by asking “In what language is this holy?” after describing the death of innocent children when it presents the image of children playing and having their room blown up.. How each person interprets religion or the words of a holy script can lead to argument and conflict. Eventually, religions get so caught up in the conflict they forget what the point of their religion is. Death seems natural. A martyr, someone who dies in the name of God, is holy in many religions, but when is death ever holy? Naomi Shihab Nye is questioning when death ever became the norm, or the right thing to do. My favorite line is “if this is holy, can we have some new religions please?” I agree with this point. We, as humans, have found a way to turn our faith and religion into war and hatred. We must find a way to relate to each other in faithful and not violent ways. The religions indirectly teach and reference violence and why would this happen?.

Main theme

• Violence
• Death of innocent people and children
• Inhumanity 
• The religions
• Sacrifice

 

biography of Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou, 

born Marguerite Ann Johnson April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri, is an American poet, memoirist, actress and an important figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. In 2001 she was named one of the 30 most powerful women in America by Ladies Home Journal. Maya Angelou is known for her series of six autobiographies, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, (1969 which was nominated for a National Book Award and called her magnum opus. Her volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Her best quote " If you have only simile in you give to the people you love"

women in poetry

Maya Angelou



Still I Rise by Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

All things not considered

Biography of Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and Nye spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. Her experience of both cultural difference and different cultures has influenced much of her work. Known for poetry that lends a fresh perspective to ordinary events, people, and objects, Nye has said that, for her, “the primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” Characterizing Nye’s “prolific canon” in Contemporary Women Poets, Paul Christensen noted that Nye “is building a reputation…as the voice of childhood in America, the voice of the girl at the age of daring exploration.” In her work, according to Jane Tanner in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Nye observes the business of living and the continuity among all the world’s inhabitants…She is international in scope and internal in focus.” Nye is also considered one of the leading female poets of the American Southwest. 

A contributor to Contemporary Poets wrote that she “brings attention to the female as a humorous, wry creature with brisk, hard intelligence and a sense of personal freedom unheard of” in the history of pioneer women.
Nye received her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and continues to live and work in the city. “My poems and stories often begin with the voices of our neighbors, mostly Mexican American, always inventive and surprising,” Nye wrote for Four Winds Press. “I never get tired of mixtures.” A contributor to Contemporary Southern Writers wrote that Nye’s poetry “is playfully and imaginatively instructive, borrows from Eastern and Middle Eastern and Native American religions, and resembles the meditative poetry of William Stafford, Wallace Stevens, and Gary Snyder.” Nye’s first two chapbooks were published in the 1970s. Both Tattooed Feet(1977) and Eye-to-Eye (1978) are written in free verse and structured around the theme of a journey or quest. They announced Nye as a “wandering poet”, interested in travel, place, and cultural exchange. In her first full-length collection, Different Ways to Pray (1980), Nye explores the differences between, and shared experiences of, cultures from California to Texas, from South America to Mexico. In “Grandfather’s Heaven,” a child declares: “Grandma liked me even though my daddy was a Moslem.” As Tanner observed, “with her acceptance of different ‘ways to pray’ is also Nye’s growing awareness that living in the world can sometimes be difficult.”
Nye’s next books include On the Edge of the Sky (1981), a slim volume printed on handmade paper, and Hugging the Jukebox (1982), a full-length collection that also won the Voertman Poetry Prize. In Hugging the Jukebox, Nye continues to focus on the ordinary, on connections between diverse peoples, and on the perspectives of those in other lands. She writes: “We move forward, / confident we were born into a large family, / our brothers cover the earth.” Nye creates poetry from everyday scenes throughout Hugging the Jukebox in poems like “The Trashpickers of San Antonio” and the title poem, where a boy is enthusiastic about the jukebox he adopts and sings its songs in a way that “strings a hundred passionate sentences in a single line.” Reviewers generally praised Hugging the Jukebox, noting Nye’s warmth and celebratory tone. Writing in the Village Voice, Mary Logue commented that in Nye’s poems about daily life, “sometimes the fabric is thin and the mundaneness of the action shows through. But, in an alchemical process of purification, Nye often pulls gold from the ordinary.” According to Library Journal contributor David Kirby, the poet “seems to be in good, easy relation with the earth and its peoples.”
The poems in Yellow Glove (1986) present a more mature perspective tempered by tragedy and sorrow. In “Blood” Nye considers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She describes a café in combat-weary Beirut, bemoans “a world where no one saves anyone,” and observes “The Gardener” for whom “everything she planted gave up under the ground.” Georgia Review contributor Philip Booth declared that Nye brings “home to readers both how variously and how similarly all people live.” In Red Suitcase (1994), Nye continues to explore the effect of on-going violence on everyday life in the Middle East. Writing for Booklist, Pat Monaghan explained that “some of her most powerful poems deal with her native land’s continuing search for peace and the echoes of that search that resound in an individual life. Nye is a fluid poet, and her poems are also full of the urgency of spoken language. Her direct, unadorned vocabulary serves her well: ‘A boy filled a bottle with water. / He let it sit. / Three days later it held the power / of three days.’ Such directness has its own mystery, its own depth and power, which Nye exploits to great effect.”
Fuel (1998) is perhaps Nye’s most acclaimed volume. The poems range over a variety of subjects, settings and scenes. Reviewing the book for Ploughshares, Victoria Clausi regarded it as, above all, an attempt at connection: “Nye’s best poems often act as conduits between opposing or distant forces. 

Yet these are not didactic poems that lead to forced epiphanic moments. Rather, the carefully crafted connections offer bridges on which readers might find their own stable footing, enabling them to peek over the railings at the lush scenery.” Like her mentor, William Stafford, Nye again and again manifests her “belief in the value of the overlooked, the half-forgotten,” wrote Clausi, as well as investigating more “worldly concerns” like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though Clausi believed that Nye’s “poetics require a calmer language,” a reviewer forPublisher’s Weekly found that “Nye’s witnessings of everday life and strife never quite acquire collective force, yet they convey a delicate sense of moral concern and a necessary sense of urgency.”
After the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, Nye became an active voice for Arab-Americans, speaking out against both terrorism and prejudice. The lack of understanding between Americans and Arabs led her to collect poems she had written which dealt with the Middle East and her experiences as an Arab-American into one volume. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002) received praise for the timeliness of its message. Publisher’s Weekly declared that it was “an excellent way to invite exploration and discussion of events far away and their impact here at home.” Nye’s next book, You and Yours (2005), continues to explore the Middle East and the possibilities of poetic response. Divided into two sections, the first deals with Nye’s personal experiences as a mother and traveler and intersperses Nye’s typical free-verse with prose poems. Part two examines the Middle East with “indignity and compassion,” according to Publisher’s Weekly. Donna Seaman wrote that the book is “tender yet forceful, funny and commonsensical, reflective and empathic,” adding, “Nye writes radiant poems of nature and piercing poems of war, always touching base with homey details and radiant portraits of family and neighbors. Nye’s clarion condemnation of prejudice and injustice reminds readers that most Americans have ties to other lands and that all concerns truly are universal.”
In addition to her poetry collections, Nye has produced fiction for children, poetry and song recordings, and poetry translations. She has also produced a book of essays,Never in a Hurry (1996), and edited several anthologies, including the award-winningThis Same Sky (1992), which represents 129 poets from sixty-eight countries. In her introduction to the anthology Nye writes, “Whenever someone suggests ‘how much is lost in translation!’ I want to say, ‘Perhaps—but how much is gained!’“ Booklist critic Hazel Rochman called it “an extraordinary anthology, not only in its global range…but also in the quality of the selections and the immediacy of their appeal.” Nye also compiled and edited a bilingual anthology of Mexican poetry, The Tree Is Older Than You Are (1995). Nye edited the collection I Feel a Little Jumpy around You (1996), which combines 194 “his and her” poems, pairing a poem written by a man with one written by a woman. And Nye’s anthology The Space between Our Footsteps (1998) is a collection of the work of 127 contemporary Middle-Eastern poets and artists representing nineteen countries.
As a children’s writer, Nye is acclaimed for her sensitivity and cultural awareness. Her book Sitti’s Secrets (1994) concerns an Arab-American child’s relationship with hersitti—Arabic for grandmother—who lives in a Palestinian village. Hazel Rochman, inBooklist, praised Nye for capturing the emotions of the “child who longs for a distant grandparent” as well as for writing a narrative that deals personally with Arabs and Arab Americans. In 1997 Nye published Habibi, her first young-adult novel. Readers meet Liyana Abboud, an Arab-American teen who moves with her family to her Palestinian father’s native country during the 1970s, only to discover that the violence in Jerusalem has not yet abated. As Liyana notes, “in Jerusalem, so much old anger floated around…[that] the air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names.” Autobiographical in its focus, Habibi was praised by Karen Leggett, who noted in the New York Times Book Review that the novel magnifies through the lens of adolescence “the joys and anxieties of growing up” and that Nye is “meticulously sensitive to this rainbow of emotion.” Nye sees her writing for children as part of her larger goals as a writer. As Nye explained to a Children’s Literature Review contributor, “to counteract negative images conveyed by blazing headlines, writers must steadily transmit simple stories closer to heart and more common to everyday life. Then we will be doing our job.”
Nye told Contemporary Authors: “I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone or something is late—there’s that rich possibility of noticing more, in the meantime…Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.”