The Language of Poetry - LanguageArts-NHS

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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?
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