In order to get a general view of the polyphonic character of twentieth- and twenty first- century poetry, we have read a brief anthology from which you chose your favorite poems. For the second mid-term test, and for the colloquy as well, you will read, atudy and analyze all poems. In order to get ready for that, now we'll do two activities.
Activity n° 1
In the "Comments" section below, include a brief note about the author you chose and his/her style or other characteristics you think are relevant (eventually I'll edit the comments, if there's anything to add). VERY IMPORTANT: this morning, many of you had already chosen a poet, so you may write about them. Those of you who had not, please choose the writers that were left out during the class, so that all poets are now discussed in the blog.
Activity n° 2
In a one-page paper (Times New Romans or Arial 11; 1.5 spaces) relate the form and content of the poem you have chosen, and add a conclusion in which you explain what you interpret the message of the poem is (remember that the message stems from the combination of form and content). Hand in your assignment on May 30th. Once I give you back the paper with the feedback, you'll write a clean second version, which you'll share with your classmates. For the colloquy, you are not supposed to repeat what you read in your classmates' papers, but to use those ideas as departing points to develop your own analysis.
In this way, you'll all contribute to each other's learning and understanding poetry.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). Renowned poet, world traveler, spiritual seeker, founding member of a major literary movement, champion of human and civil rights, photographer and songwriter, political gadfly, teacher and co-founder of a poetics school. At times, his opinions landed him in trouble: he was expelled from Cuba and Czechoslovakia in 1965 and, like many outspoken artists and activists, became the subject of a voluminous FBI dossier. Accredited with coining the term “Flower Power”, Ginsberg became a figure head of the global youth movement in the late 1960s. Ginsberg might have been an American by birth, but through his extensive travel he developed a global consciousness that greatly affected his writings and viewpoint.
ResponderEliminarHe was a highly visible figure with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in the beat generation literary movement in the 1950s. His parents, second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants, were left-wing radicals interested in Marxism, nudism, feminism, all modern ideas. He was influenced by Walt Whitman and William Blake. Ginsberg's style was a spontaneous composition with attention paid to the natural wanderings of the mind and the rhythms of breathing. Ginsberg spoke out on such controversial issues as the Vietnam War, gay rights (he listed his lifelong companion, Peter Orlovsky, as his spouse in his Who’s Who entry), and drugs (he was an early participant in Timothy Leary’s psilocybin and LSD experiments). He wrote about the casualties of capitalism and consumer society, and in particular the lives of bohemians, his friends. “America” is a savagely comic commentary on American values.
Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts – October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts) she was the youngest of three sisters. After her parents moved to Wellesley, Mass., Anne attended public schools from the time she was 6 until she was 17. At the age of 17, her parents sent her off to Rogers Hall, a preparatory school for girls, in Lowell, Mass.; hoping to 'cure' her of her wild nature and shape her into a proper woman. It was here that Anne first began to write poetry, which was published in the school yearbook. Yet shortly after beginning the call she had, her mother, who had come from a family of writers, accused Anne of plagiarism, disbelieving that her daughter could possess the talent to write such lovely poetry. In 1954, Anne began struggling with recurring depression and began seeking counseling. In 1956 Anne’s mental condition worsened, leading up to her first psychiatric hospitalization and her first suicide attempt. In December of that year, under the guidance of her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin, she resumed writing poetry. Anne Sexton was known for her highly personal, confessional verse (confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about mental illness, sexuality, and despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s). She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her suicidal tendencies, long battle against depression and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children. Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other "confessional" poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. She made the experience of being a woman a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter.
ResponderEliminarGwendolyn Brooks: (1917–2000) was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago when she was young. Her father was a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother was a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist. They were supportive of their daughter's passion for reading and writing. Brooks was thirteen when her first published poem, "Eventide," appeared in American Childhood; by the time she was seventeen she was publishing poems frequently in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago's black population. After such formative experiences as attending junior college and working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she developed her craft in poetry workshops and began writing the poems, focusing on urban blacks. Brooks once described her style as "folksy narrative," but she varied her forms, using free verse, sonnets, and other models.
ResponderEliminarIn 1967 Brooks's work achieved a new tone and vision. She changed to a more simple writing style so that her themes could come across more strongly. This change can be traced to her growing political awareness. She also increased the use of her vernacular (a language spoken by people of a particular group or from a certain area) to make her works more understandable for African Americans, not just for university audiences and the editors of poetry magazines.
Mitsuye Yamada was born in Kyushu, Japan in 1923 but was raised in Seattle, Washington until 1942, when she was removed with her family to a concentration camp in Idaho. This traumatic experience in which her freedom was denied was the starting point of many poems such as “The question of Loyalty”. Her role as a poet has never restricted to art but has aimed to defend and revalue ethnical minorities, human rights, multiculturalism and feminism. Her active involvement in activities that she described as aiming to change the outside world made her also have an important participation in political, educational and social activities.
ResponderEliminarSome critics qualify her poetry as taut and spare, often offering a reflection of an inner moment in connection with the outer environment. The language she uses is simple and the short verses go straight to the conflicts presented in the poems.
Celina Casanova
Langston Hughes
ResponderEliminarJames Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue" which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue". Langston Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Hughes's father left his family going to Cuba, and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States.
During his time in England in the early 1920s, Hughes became part of the black expatriate community. In November 1924, Hughes returned to the U. S. to live with his mother in Washington, D.C.and worked at various odd jobs.
The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, a historically black university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.
After Hughes earned a B.A. degree from Lincoln University in 1929, he returned to New York. Hughes lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of his life. During the 1930s and became a resident of Westfield, New Jersey. Some academics and biographers today believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, similar in manner to Walt Whitman. To retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted
Hughes identified as unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He stressed the theme of "black is beautiful" as he explored the black human condition in a variety of depths. His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience.
His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.
His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. In addition to his example in social attitudes, Hughes had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.
Claudia Urbani
ADRIENNE RICH
ResponderEliminarAdrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century",and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse"
Rich's poetry is extremely accessible and readable. However, there are a few allusions that cannot be understood and, from time to time, there will be references to events or literary works that will not be immediately recognized by students. This material or these references are glossed in the text so the student can understand the historical or literary context.
Other problems occur when there is fundamental hostility to the poet over feminism. The instructor will have to explain that feminism simply means a belief in the social, political, and economic equality of women and men. Explain, also, that Rich is not a man-hater or in any way unwilling to consider men as human beings. Rather, her priority is to establish the fundamental concerns of her women readers. Rich is simultaneously a political, polemical, and lyric poet. It is important also to establish for the poems of the '60s, the Vietnam War protests as background as well as the feminist movement of the '60s and '70s.
It is also important to emphasize that in many respects the '60s and '70s were reaction to the confinement of the '50s and the feminine mystique of that period. In addition, stress that the political background of the poems by Adrienne Rich connects the personal and the political.
Rich employs free verse, dialogue, and the interweaving of several voices. She evolves from a more tightly constructed traditional rhymed poetry to a more open, loose, and flexible poetic line. The instructor must stress again that poetic subjects are chosen often for their political value and importance. It is important once again to stress that politics and art are intertwined, that they cannot be separated. Aesthetic matters affect the conditions of everyday life.
Florencia Garcia Torres.
James Wright (1927–1980) was an American poet.Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language surrealists, had dropped fixed meters. His transformation achieved its maximum expression with the publication of the seminal The Branch Will Not Break (1963), which positioned Wright as curious counterpoint to the Beats and New York schools, which predominated on the American coasts. Wright had been working for years with his friend Robert Bly, collaborating on the translation of world poets in the influential magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties). Such influences fertilized Wright's unique perspective and helped put the Midwest back on the poetic map.
ResponderEliminarWright had discovered a terse, imagistic, free verse of clarity, and power. During the next ten years Wright would go on to pen some of the most beloved and frequently anthologized masterpieces of the century, such as "A Blessing," "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," and "I Am a Sioux Indian Brave, He Said to Me in Minneapolis. "Technically, Wright was an innovator, especially in the use of his titles, first lines, and last lines, which he used to great dramatic effect in defense of the lives of the disenfranchised. He is equally well known for his tender depictions of the bleak landscapes of the post-industrial American Midwest. Since his death, Wright has developed a cult following, transforming him into a seminal writer of ever increasing influence. Each year, hundreds of writers gather to pay tribute at the James Wright Poetry Festival in Martins Ferry.
Wright's early poetry is relatively conventional in form and meter, especially compared with his later, looser poetry. His work with translations of German and South American poets, as well as the influence of Robert Bly, had considerable influence on his own poems.
His poetry often deals with the disenfranchised, or the outsider, American; yet it is also often inward probing. Wright suffered from depression and bipolar mood disorders and also battled alcoholism his entire life. He experienced several nervous breakdowns, was hospitalized, and was subjected to electroshock therapy. His dark moods and focus on emotional suffering were part of his life and often the focus of his poetry, although given the emotional turmoil he experienced personally, his poems are often remarkably optimistic in expressing a faith in life and human transcendence. His seminal 1963 volume The Branch Will Not Break is one example of his belief in the human spirit.
His 1972 Collected Poems was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to his other awards, Wright received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Judith Ortiz Cofer
ResponderEliminarJudith Ortiz Cofer was born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico in 1952. Ortiz Cofer's work can largely be classified as creative nonfiction. Her narrative le is strongly influenced by oral storytelling, which was inspired by her grandmother, an able storyteller in the tradition of teaching through storytelling among Puerto Rican women. Cofer's autobiographical work often focuses on her attempts at negotiating her life between two cultures, American and Puerto Rican, and how this process informs her sensibilities as a writer. Her work also explores such subjects as racism and sexism in American culture, machismo and female empowerment in Puerto Rican culture, and the challenges diasporic immigrants face in a new culture.
Among Cofer's more well known essays are "The Story of My Body" and "The Myth of the Latin Woman," both reprinted in The Latin Deli.
In 1984, Cofer joined the faculty of the University of Georgia, where she is currently Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing. In April 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Ortiz_Cofer
Charles Simic was born 9 May 1938. He is a Serbian-American poet, and was co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
ResponderEliminarSimic was born in Belgrade, Serbia then part of Yugoslavia. Growing up as a child in war-torn Europe shaped much of his world-view, Simic states. In an interview from the Cortland Review he said, "Being one of the millions of displaced persons made an impression on me. In addition to my own little story of bad luck, I heard plenty of others. I'm still amazed by all the vileness and stupidity I witnessed in my life." Simic immigrated to the United States with his family in 1954 when he was sixteen. He grew up in Chicago and received his B.A. from New York University. He is professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives on the shore of Bow Lake in Strafford, New Hampshire.
He began to make a name for himself in the early to mid 1970s as a literary minimalist, writing terse, imagistic poems. Critics have often referred to Simic poems as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes." Simic has stated: "Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is merely the bemused spectator." He writes on such diverse topics as jazz, art, and philosophy. He is also a translator, essayist and philosopher, opining on the current state of contemporary American poetry. He held the position of poetry editor of The Paris Review, and was replaced by Dan Chiasson.
Simic was one of the judges for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize and continues to contribute poetry and prose to The New York Review of Books. Simic received the US$100,000 Wallace Stevens Award in 2007 from the Academy of American Poets. Simic was selected by James Billington, Librarian of Congress, to be the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, succeeding Donald Hall. Billington referred to "the rather stunning and original quality of his poetry"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simic
Elizabeth Bishop
ResponderEliminarElizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.
Elizabeth Bishop, an only child, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father, a successful builder, died when she was eight months old, Bishop’s mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916. Effectively orphaned during her very early childhood, she lived with her grandparents on a farm in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a period she referenced in her writings. This was also where she developed into a first-class fisherwoman. Bishop's mother remained in an asylum until her death in 1934, and the two were never reunited.
Later in childhood, Bishop's paternal family gained custody, and she was removed from the care of her grandparents and moved in with her father's wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts. However, Bishop was unhappy in Worcester, and her separation from her grandparents made her lonely. While she was living in Worcester, she developed chronic asthma, from which she suffered for the rest of her life.
Bishop boarded at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, where she studied music. Then she entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, shortly before the stock market crash, planning to be a composer. She gave up music because of a terror of performance and switched to English where she took courses including 16th and 17th century literature and the novel. Bishop published her work in her senior year in The Magazine (based in California) and 1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy (one year her senior), Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark. Bishop graduated in 1934.
She considered herself to be "a strong feminist," she only wanted to be judged based on the quality of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation.
In contrast to this confessional style involving large amounts of self-exposure, Bishop's style of writing, though it sometimes involved sparse details from her personal life, was known for its highly detailed and objective, distant point of view and for its reticence on the sordid subject matter that obsessed her contemporaries. In contrast to a poet like Lowell, when Bishop wrote about details and people from her own life (as she did in her story about her childhood and her mentally unstable mother in "In the Village"), she always used discretion.
In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Bishop won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as two Guggenheim Fellowships and an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. In 1976, she became the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and remains the only American to be awarded that prize.
Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was very young her father died, her mother was committed to a mental asylum, and she was sent to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia. She earned a bachelor's degree from Vassar College in 1934.
ResponderEliminarShe was independently wealthy, and from 1935 to 1937 she spent time traveling to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery which surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse, North and South, published in 1946.
She was influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a close friend, mentor, and stabilizing force in her life. Unlike her contemporary and good friend Robert Lowell, who wrote in the "confessional" style, Bishop's poetry avoids explicit accounts of her personal life, and focuses instead with great subtlety on her impressions of the physical world.
Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. She lived for many years in Brazil, communicating with friends and colleagues in America only by letter. She wrote slowly and published sparingly (her Collected Poems number barely a hundred), but the technical brilliance and formal variety of her work is astonishing. For years she was considered a "poet's poet," but with the publication of her last book, Geography III, in 1976, Bishop was finally established as a major force in contemporary literature.
She received the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for her collection, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring. Her Complete Poems won the National Book Award in 1970. That same year, Bishop began teaching at Harvard University, where she worked for seven years.
Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets in 1964 and served as a Chancellor from 1966 to 1979. She died in Cambridge, Massachussetts, in 1979, and her stature as a major poet continues to grow through the high regard of the poets and critics who have followed her.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
ResponderEliminarThis American poet, dramatist, lyricist, lecturer, translator, and short story writer was born in Rockland, Maine to Cora Lounella (nurse) and Henry Tollman Millay (schoolteacher). Her middle name comes from St Vincent's Hospital, in New York, where her uncle's life was saved soon before her birth. She called herself Vincent. Millay's mother was a strong-willed woman who divorced her husband because of his financial irresponsibility and raised her three daughters on her own. They lived in poverty and moved constantly from town to town. However, Cora encouraged her daughters "to be ambitious and self-sufficient, teaching them an appreciation of music and literature from an early age". Millay and her sisters always spoke their minds, even when Millay had problems with authorities from an early age due to her frankness. They travelled with a trunk full of classics from which Cora read to the girls. Classic literature influenced Millay’s diction and form (sonnets) In 1912, Millay took part in a poetry contest and got fourth prize with her poem "Renascence",which was widely acclaimed. Caroline B. Dow, a school director who had heard her recite her poems, encouraged Millay to attend Vassar College and helped her financially. After her graduation in 1917, Millay moved to Greenwich Village in NY, where she led a bohemian life. She was an activist and sympathized with socialist ideas of freedom and non-conformity, though she never became a Communist. Instead of accepting a comfortable job as secretary, she decided to live on her writing and rented a nine-foot-wide attic. About writers’ life in the Village, she said they were: "very, very poor and very, very merry." She was also openly bisexual and had several affairs. Floyd Dell and others proposed to her and she turned them down. In 1920, her collection "A Few Figs From Thistles" caused controversy because of Millay's explored the issues of female sexuality and feminism. In 1919, she wrote the anti-war play Aria da Capo. Millay was the third woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver." She later married the feminist widower Eugen Boissevain in 1923, with whom she had a "sexually-open" relationship throughout their 26-year marriage. Boissevan assumed full responsibility for her medical care and gave up his own career to manage his wife's until he died in 1949, a year before Millay's death.
Charles Simic
ResponderEliminarCharles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1954 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in Chicago until 1958.
His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his Bachelor's degree from New York University while working at night to cover the costs of tuition.
His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published the following year. Since then he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, twenty titles of his own poetry among them, including That Little Something(Harcourt, 2008), My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of Gods and Devils (2000); and Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.
His other books of poetry include Walking the Black Cat (1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; A Wedding in Hell (1994);Hotel Insomnia (1992); The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (1990); and Unending Blues (1986).
In his essay "Poetry and Experience," Simic wrote: "At least since Emerson and Whitman, there's a cult of experience in American poetry. Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily."
Simic has also published numerous translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry, and is the author of several books of essays, including Orphan Factory. He has edited several anthologies, including an edition of The Best American Poetry in 1992.
About his work, a reviewer for the Harvard Review said, "There are few poets writing in America today who shares his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures ... Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse."
Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2007. About the appointment, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said, "The range of Charles Simic's imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative and surprising. He has given us a rich body of highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor."
"I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn't speak English until I was 15," responded Simic after being named Poet Laureate.
Simic was chosen to receive the Academy Fellowship in 1998, and elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. He has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995.
Most recently, he was announced as the recipient of the 2007Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets. Simic is Emeritus Professor of the University of New Hampshire where he has taught since 1973.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/27
EliminarLangston Hughes was an African-American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.
ResponderEliminarHughes identified as unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He stressed the theme of "black is beautiful" as he explored the black human condition in a variety of depths. His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience.
His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind," Hughes is quoted as saying. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.
Hughes stressed a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists.
Some academics and biographers today believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, similar in manner to Walt Whitman.
Charles Simic
ResponderEliminarHe was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1954 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in and around Chicago until 1958.
His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his Bachelor's degree from New York University while working at night to cover the costs of tuition.
In relation to his style,some poems reflect a surreal, metaphysical bent and others offer grimly realistic portraits of violence and despair. In most of his works childhood experiences of war, poverty, and hunger also lie behind a number of poems. Simic’s subjects are often surreal, evoking a dark Eastern Europe of the mind, his language is frank and accessible. Besides, Simic tends to include elements of strageness in his poems and this is seen in the poem "The Library" ehere angels appear.
Sources: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charles-simic
www.poetsorg.com
Mitsuye Yamada (born July 5, 1923) is a Japanese American activist, feminist, essayist, poet, story writer, editor, and former professor of English.
ResponderEliminarMitsuye Yamada was born Japan. Her parents were both first-generation Japanese Americans who were visiting Japan when she was born. Her family returned to the U.S. in 1926 and settled in Seattle, Washington.
Yamada spent most of her childhood and youth in Seattle, Washington.[2] Mitsuye's father was arrested by the FBI for espionage after the U.S joined the Second World War. In 1942, Mitsuye and her family were interned at Minidoka War Relocation Center, Idaho. She was allowed to leave the camp with her brother because they renounced loyalty to the Emperor of Japan; she went to the University of Cincinnati in 1944. Mitsuye and her brother also were allowed to leave the camp in order to attend college and work and both attended the University of Cincinnati.
Mitsuye became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1955. She considers herself Nisei (second-generation Japanese American).
Yamada's professed purpose for writing is to encourage Asian American women to speak out and defy the cultural codes that encourage Asian American women to be silent.
Yamada's first publication was Camp Notes and Other Poems. The book is a chronological documentary, beginning with "Evacuation" from Seattle, moving in the camp through "Desert Storm," and concluding with poems recounting the move to Cincinnati. "Cincinnati" illustrates the visible racial violence and "The Question of Loyalty" shows the invisible humiliation of the Japanese during World War II. She wrote the book to promote public awareness about how the Japanese were discriminated against during the war and to open discussion of the issue. With this publication, Yamada challenged Japanese traditions that demand silence from the female.
In her latest volume, "Desert Run: Poems and Stories", Yamada explores her heritage and discovers that her identity involves a cultural straddle between Japan and the US. Some poems, especially "The Club," indicate that Yamada expanded her point of view to include feminist as well as racist issues because they recount sexual and domestic violence against women.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsuye_Yamada
Langston Hughes
ResponderEliminarLangston Hughes's stories deal with and serve as a commentary of conditions befalling African Americans during the Depression Era. As Ostrom explains, "To a great degree, his stories speak for those who are disenfranchised, cheated, abused, or ignored because of race or class." (51) Hughes's stories speak of the downtrodden African-Americans neglected and overlooked by a prejudiced society. The recurring theme of powerlessness leads to violence is exemplified by the actions of Sargeant in "On the Road", old man Oyster in "Gumption", and the robber in "Why, You Reckon?"
Hughes's "On the Road" explores what happens when a powerless individual takes action on behalf of his conditions. The short story illustrates the desperation and consequent violent actions of one man's homeless plight on a snowy winter evening. "He stopped and stood on the sidewalk hunched over- hungry, sleepy, and cold- looking up and down." (Hughes 90) Here, Sargeant is without the basic necessities of life- shelter.
HE HAS been called the voice of Harlem and the poet laureate of African-Americans. James Langston Hughes was a virtuoso who imbued his lines with the echoes of jazz and gospel. More important, Hughes was a 20th-century Chaucer, capturing common experiences in bold new rhythms. He once said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street... (these songs) had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."
Hughes knew what it took to keep on going. He was born in Joplin, Mo., on Feb. 1, 1902. He parents divorced when he was small, and his father later moved to Mexico. Young Langston began writing in eighth grade and was voted class poet.
Hughes attended Columbia University for one year before traveling to Africa. There, he found one of his recurring themes: the archetypal black who has heard the rivers from the Congo to the Mississippi.
Hughes then traveled to France and did odd jobs for much of 1924.
In November of that year, Hughes moved to Harlem and found the rhythm his words needed. The Harlem Renaissance was flourishing, and he loved to write while sitting in clubs, listening to blues and jazz. His first poetry book was published in 1926.
He earned a bachelor's degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, in 1929. He would pen 15 more poetry collections before his death in 1967.
Critics have hailed his poems for their distinctive voice and lyricism. But Hughes was most concerned with maintaining his vision. "We younger Negro artists," he wrote in 1926, "now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they aren't, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow...."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0228/p18s02-hfes.html