Poem

“’ But this is merely a negative definition of the value of education’” (23-24). Mark Halliday wrote “The Value of Education” from a first person standpoint. The introduction and the use of “I” demonstrates the poem is about the speaker. Likewise, the speaker uses imagery, self-recognition, and his own personal thoughts throughout the poem. He goes on throughout the poem stating external confrontations he is not doing because he is in the library receiving an education and reading books. With this in mind, the speaker goes on to convey images in your head to show a realization of things he could be doing if he were not in the library getting an education.

Everyone in the world has their own identity but some are still searching for it. Many base their identity on race, religion, culture and language because it’s easier to belong to a certain group. However, there are some people who struggle with finding where they belong. For instance, James McBride in The Color of Water wonders who he is through most his childhood and some of his adult life. Mcbride tries to find himself by learning about his mother's background. After evaluating his mom’s past,culture and race his own issues with himself were made clearer because now he finally knows where he came from.

Reflection on pg. 34 Night poem by Elie Wiesel In my eyes, this poem is a very powerful work, full of poetic devices that help drive home the point of the poem. This poem is written by Elie after he and his father realize that they have survived selection at Birkenau.

|Spend about 1 hour on this section. Think carefully about the poems before you write your answer. |

Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (“Poem for the Dead Californios”), is a commentary on what happened to the original inhabitants of California when California was still Mexico, and an address to the speaker's dead ancestors. Utilizing a unique dynamic, consistently alternating between Spanish and English, Cervantes accurately represents the fear, hatred, and humility experienced by the “Californios” through rhythm, arrangement, tone, and most importantly, through use of language.

The definition of the protagonist identity is first question in his younger years as a child in the introduction of the first chapter. Growing up and attending a majority white school the young protagonist does not realize that he is half white half black until an incident in graded school. At the end of his second term at school the principal enter his classroom and asked all of the white scholars to stand in which case he stood among them thinking nothing of the case. It was not until the teacher asked him to sit down and to only stand once the principal asks for the others rise his race was revealed. Faced with the realization of his new identity as a colored boy, the young protagonist is devastated. He sees the other

The dripping droplets of sangria left scars of acne blood pockets on the vast hirsute landscape of his right hand’s skin. The fresh plasma fluid oozed out of his pores as if long, gnarly fingernails squeezed the layer of skin coating the yellow pulp from a new ripe pimple. His heart precipitously pumped into a state of distress as if he was a teenager, with a red-spotted face, being confronted by bullies. He was a hostage to the sharp, rounded metallic end pointed in the direction of his head. He stood at the edge of death’s abyss…

A lack of self-awareness tended the narrator’s life to seem frustrating and compelling to the reader. This lack often led him to offer generalizations about ““colored” people” without seeing them as human beings. He would often forget his own “colored” roots when doing so. He vacillated between intelligence and naivete, weak and strong will, identification with other African-Americans and a complete disavowal of them. He had a very difficult time making a decision for his life without hesitating and wondering if it would be the right one.

Take a minute to imagine “Men looking like they had been/attacked repeatedly by a succession /of wild animals,” “never/ ending blasted field of corpses,” and “throats half gone, /eyes bleeding, raw meat heaped/ in piles.” These are the vividly, grotesque images Edward Mayes describes to readers in his poem, “University of Iowa Hospital, 1976.” Before even reading the poem, the title gave me a preconceived idea of what the poem might be about. “University of Iowa Hospital, 1976” describes what an extreme version of what I expected the poem to be about. The images I

He also uses informal words such as “dicey” to establish that he is just a regular person that experienced many stereotypes. The author evokes strong diction in the essay. He states that he has “the ability to alter public space in ugly ways”. This describe how people perceive the author because of his race. He also says that he was “surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once”. He continues to evoke diction by stating that “these truths are no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being the suspect”. He uses the word “alienation” because he feels that everybody is against him. The author expresses his emotions during these tough situations because he always feels like he is the “victim” of people’s

I have always thought and been taught that racism was a form of ignorance; people used stereotypes are the easy route, instead of looking at the individual outside of the whole. But Kelley’s thoughts on the topic rang very true to me—“Racism is knowledge…is learned behavior…” (7). When we are babies, we don’t notice or care if someone is of a different race, socioeconomic standing, sexuality; we just see them as people. It’s through repeated actions that we learn what separates us from the “other”. As a young child, my neighbor was my best friend. We played every day until I moved, but our families still kept in touch. It was until probably the 3rd or 4th grade that I realized he wasn’t like me, he had Down syndrome. Of course, that didn’t make a difference to me then or now, but I find it to be a striking example in my own life that as a young person, I was unable to see anything different about us, to me we were the same, we were

Reflections Within is a non-traditional stanzaic poem made up of five stanzas containing thirty-four lines that do not form a specific metrical pattern. Rather it is supported by its thematic structure. Each of the five stanzas vary in the amount of lines that each contain. The first stanza is a sestet containing six lines. The same can be observed of the second stanza. The third stanza contains eight lines or an octave. Stanzas four and five are oddly in that their number of lines which are five and nine.

In Pat Barker’s “For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend,” Pat describes the challenges that she faces when making friends as a person of color. Pat describes how instead of seeing her as a unique individual, people immediately label her as black, and overcompensate their actions and words around her. The friends that Pat associates with are acutely aware of their differences, like tastes in music and food, and feel the need to either explain themselves, or put on a performance of liking and enjoying black culture. “Men and Women are from Earth,” by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, also carries a similar dilemma. Within this excerpt, the authors describe how in various other writings like Language and Social

Ted Kooser, the thirteenth Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner, is known for his honest and accessible writing. Kooser’s poem “A Spiral Notebook” was published in 2004, in the book Good Poems for Hard Times, depicting a spiral notebook as something that represents more than its appearance. Through the use of imagery, diction, and structure, Ted Kooser reveals the reality of a spiral notebook to be a canvas of possibilities and goes deeper to portray the increasing complexities in life as we age.

The book’s character’s main problem is finding individuality in racism. For the duration of the book, the narrator is constantly fighting racism and stereotypes. Ellison put many examples in the book to help show the character’s fight to be seen equal. Ellison shows that, through the character himself, that you can not tell people who to be. However, Ellison throws curves at the narrator that challenges