Poetry Performance and Analysis
In class that week, we started the Langston Hughes reports on Color, A Song to a Negro Wash-woman, Ballad of the Landlord, Theme for English B, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, and Negro. When we reported, we each provided a performance of the poem, along with a discussion of how the poem's title, speaker, setting, tone, authorial choices, and theme work together to shape meaning. We formulate a thesis statement based on the authorial choices. Color and a Song to a Negro Wash-woman illustrate a call to see beauty and take pride in your skin tone and heritage, while Theme for English B and the Ballad of the Landlord call out the subhuman treatment o African Americans by white authorities of housing and education systems. Finally, in Negro and the Negro Speaks of Rivers, Hughes asserts that the cultural knowledge and contributions of black people, while unseen, are valuable to society. From these 6 poems, we briefly gleaned on Langston Hughes' style: in these poems, Hughes frequently utilized line breaks, both enjambment and end stop breaks, simple language, repetition and anaphora, parallel structures, defiant tones, and allegory to paint a picture of the lives of black people and enlighten his audience on the hypocrisy of the higher and often white ruling class of America.
The presentation and discussion of my poems was somewhat of a challenge for me because I felt like I had to contain the same amount of information my classmates had. When I heard the first reports and when my teacher further expounded on the poems, while I had read both poems several times, I was scared that I would blank out. Our teacher also required visual aids, and I opted to use the visual aids as a guide instead of reading straight from the Powerpoint. Because of the further elaborations on the first 4 poems, I bought time and managed to improve my visual aids and come up with stronger thesis statements on the poetry. It was nervewracking, but I'm glad I got through.