To mark the end of our poetry club, I decided to share some poems from my most favorite work of poetry, Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes. Published in 1951, Montage is a send-up of everything beautiful and terrible in Black culture in post-war Harlem. One of the strongest themes in the book is the representation music in the poems. 
The tenth poem in our series is "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes. We read this poem in class on Monday, November 8. In addition to having two students read this poem aloud as we usually do, a third student read the poem while Ms. Miller showed the class E.B. Lewis's illustrated version of the poem. This was a big hit with the class!
The ninth poem in our series is "9." by E.E. Cummings. We read this poem in class on Thursday, November 4.by e.e. cummings
there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic
Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly
we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.
(So,when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)
The seventh poem in our collection is "Watching the Mayan Women" by Luisa Villani. We talked about this poem in class on Thursday, October 28.
The sixth poem in our collection is "Spring in New Hampshire" by Claude McKay. We talked about this poem in class on Monday, October 25.by Claude McKay
Too green the springing April grass,
Too blue the silver-speckled sky,
For me to linger here, alas,
While happy winds go laughing by,
Wasting the golden hours indoors,
Washing windows and scrubbing floors.
Too wonderful the April night,
Too faintly sweet the first May flowers,
The stars too gloriously bright,
For me to spend the evening hours,
When fields are fresh and streams are leaping,
Wearied, exhausted, dully sleeping.
The fifth poem in our collection is "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou. We talked about this poem in class on Thursday, October 21. KW requested that we read this poem, and KS, KW, and DW read the poem to our class.
At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
The glue would sting,
hands oozing
till both palms burned
at the punch clock.
Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open law book
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning.
from City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, 1993. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY.
Copyright 1993 by Martín Espada. All rights reserved.
The second poem in our poetry club is "cutting greens" by Lucille Clifton. We talked about this poem in class on Monday, October 11.| cutting greens | ||
| by Lucille Clifton curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black. the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the greens roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and i taste in my natural appetite the bond of live things everywhere. From An Ordinary Woman by Lucille Clifton published by Random House. Copyright © 1974 Lucille Clifton. Used with permission. | ||
Our first poem in the EMS Poetry Club is "My First Memory (of Librarians)" by Nikki Giovanni. We talked about this poem in class on Monday, October 4, 2010.
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