The Picture to go with my journal writing today comes from 2006...
the marriage of my niece Jaclyn to Chris.
I dedicate the BLOG today to their beautiful son Joaquin
and to all children everywhere.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Riff... from Prose to Poetry
In 1963 I was a teacher of English at Yuba City High School in Northern California. It was late August and I was working on lesson plans for my senior English classes which would begin in early September. I was trying to figure a way to get my students to know the difference between prose and poetry, a difference that wasn’t just a matter of arranging words into iambic pentameter phrases. I had decided to use an example from James Agee (Knoxville: Summer of 1915) in which he begins with a statement that quickly becomes so emotionally loaded that prose can’t carry the meaning adequately, so the author gradually breaks into pure poetry. To this day it’s one of my favorite pieces of writing. (If you’re interested, check the full text of the poem at the end of this BLOG post and you’ll see what I mean. Read it out loud.)
I remember that while I was working on the lesson, I was listening to a rebroadcast from Washington of a speech that had been delivered earlier in the day from in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I heard what soon became the famous “Dream speech” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the middle of Dr. King’s prepared speech, Mahalia Jackson, the great Gospel singer shouted out to him from behind the speakers’ stand: “Tell ‘em about the Dream, Martin, tell ‘em about the Dream.” Earlier in the program Jackson had sung the spiritual lament, “I Been rebuked and I Been Scorned.” Dr. King left off reading from his printed speech and began a riff... his extraordinary improvisation on a dream theme he had used on other occasions. It became the most nationally and internationally recognizable part of his speech. His voice rose emotionally, and he switched from prose to poetry, from descriptions of familiar statements of social injustice to a shining vision of hope for America, for what America could become.
“I have a dream,” stretching the word into deliciousness... “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”
From then on, I used Dr. King’s speech and James Agee’s poem to show the difference between prose and poetry.
Knoxville: Summer of 1915
A Prose Poem by James Agee
It has become the time of evening
when people sit on their porches
rocking gently and talking gently
and watching the street
and the standing up
into their sphere of possession of the trees,
of birds' hung havens, hangers.
People go by; things go by.
A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt;
a loud auto; a quiet auto;
people in pairs, not in a hurry,
scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually,
the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk,
the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.
A streetcar raising its iron moan:
stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan
and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past,
the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks;
the iron whine rises on rising speed;
still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell;
rises again, still fainter, fainter, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten.
Now is the night one blue dew.
Now is the night one blue dew,
my father has drained,
now he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns,
a frailing of fire who breathes ...
Parents on porches: rock and rock.
From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts.
We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there ...
They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet,
of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.
The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near.
All my people are larger bodies than mine, ...
with voices gentle and meaningless like the voice of sleeping birds.
One is an artist, he is living at home.
One is a musician, she is living at home.
One is my mother who is good to me.
One is my father who is good to me.
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth;
and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,
lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.
May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father,
oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;
and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed.
Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:
and those receive me, who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
but will not, no ,will not, not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.
