The Language of Poetry - LanguageArts-NHS

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iReading for Information Use with “Lord Randall,” “Ballad,” and “Midwinter Blues,” pages 736–740. 742 unit 7: the language of poetry from Blues Poems Essay by Kevin Young What’s the Connection? The speakers of the poems you just read all share the experience of lost love, a theme that runs through blues music. But sorrow isn’t the only way to face hard times. In the following selection, you’ll learn how people transform sorrow into solace by singing the blues. Skill Focus: Take Notes Note taking is a strategy for organizing information by showing how ideas relate to one another. To take notes effectively, you need to identify which ideas are important (main ideas) and which facts or examples support those ideas (supporting details). Using a chart will enable you to see at a glance how main ideas connect with supporting details. To complete such a chart, follow these steps: • Identify the topic of the selection—in this case, the blues. Write it at the top of the chart. • On a first reading, examine the supporting details used to elaborate the topic, and organize them into categories. In this essay, you can organize the details the author provides into four main categories: the origin of the blues, the feeling of the blues, the form of blues music and poetry, and the subjects of the blues. As you read the selection a second time, fill in the chart started here by relating the supporting details to the appropriate categories. This will prepare you to identify the main ideas the author presents about the blues. The Blues Origin Feeling • Originated in African- American culture Form Subjects
10 20 FOREWORD BY KEVIN YOUNG There are feelings and states of mind that are hard to describe—some might say that don’t properly exist—until we have a word for them. Catharsis, angst, schadenfreude, duende, ennui: all feelings we now know in English, but that still retain the tenor of their country and culture of origin. One could easily add the blues to this list. Indeed, you might say that the blues contain all these other words in one. The blues, after all, describe a state of being, a feeling, a form and sound not yet named until their 12 bars and repeated refrains came into being—and now that black folks have invented and named the blues, people all over the world speak them. Being part of our common language in no way denies the blues’ origins in African American culture and mouths and hands. Too many people, however, mistake the feeling of the blues with the form of the blues themselves. For in spite of navigating the depths of despair, the blues ultimately are about triumphing over that despair—or at least surviving it long enough to sing about it. With the blues, the form fights the feeling. Survival and loss, sin and regret, boasts and heartbreak, leaving and loving, a pigfoot and a bottle of beer—the blues are a series of reversals, of finding love and losing it, of wanting to see yourself dead in the depths of despair, and then soon as the train comes down the track, yanking your fool head back. . . . As one saying goes, the blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man (or woman) feelin’ bad. a a TAKE NOTES Paraphrase the first sentence of this paragraph. What point is the author making? reading for information 743
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unit 7 Literary Analysis Workshop C
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Page 11: There Will Come Soft Rains Sara Tea
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