Poetry Good - Michigan 7 2024 CFMP

But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.
Veronica Brusilovski 19. ["Phillis Wheatley: Poems “On Imagination” Summary and Analysis". GradeSaver, 17 July 2019 Web. https://www.gradesaver.com/phillis-wheatley-poems/study-guide/summary-on-imagination]
The personified Fancy is in direct conversation with Imagination, and it seems to be the fancy of the speaker. The speaker seems to fall under the sway of some kind of love object, and is fettered by this attachment. Though the ominous force of Winter tries to hold the speaker's Fancy back, Imagination helps the speaker to imagine spring, and the flowering of love and possibility. Indeed, the "subject-passions" are ruled by Imagination, and Imagination has the power to create anything in this poem. But Winter, which symbolizes reality, must eventually materialize, and though the speaker's Fancy may try to break free of the shackles placed on her by love, as the sun rises, and Aurora rises with it, the speaker must turn away from the sun rise, from the mountain, and rejoin Winter.
So, even though Imagination allows hearts and minds to wander, eventually reality must set in, and reality cannot let us—the reader or the speaker—live wholly in the imagination.
The fetters described in this poem also symbolize slavery, and the limitations placed on the enslaved. Indeed, though the Fancy of the speaker wishes to ascend from the shackles placed onto her, and rise to Aurora, the reality of winter forbids this. Imagination has its limits in this poem, and ultimately Winter—reality—must step in and limit the possibilities of the Imagination. Since Winter forbids the speaker to "aspire," it seems like the speaker cannot rise, breathe, or imagine too much. Indeed, reality seems to place shackles that even Imagination cannot surpass. By ending the poem asking to "cease the unequal lay," the speaker suggests that there is an unequal relationship between reality and imagination, and implores this inequality to cease.
The relationship between the speaker and Winter is also an allegory for enslavement within this poem, as imagination is stopped by Winter's control, and the speaker must listen to Winter's demands to turn away from Aurora and the mountains against their wishes.
Black music and poems heals wounds, opens time, and key to the affs model
Jerome Ellis 20 [“The Clearing: Music, Dysfluency, Blackness, and Time” was originally published in Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, 5, no. 2, 2020, pp. 215–233 and is republished here in revised form with kind permission of the author. https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/the-clearing-music-dysfluency-blackness-and-time/ //:0
My thesis is that blackness, dysfluency,[1] and music are forces that open time. Opening brings possibilities: temporal refusal, temporal escape, temporal dissent. But because thesis also refers to a downbeat in music, my thesis must move, must metamorphose, like music. Sound is vibration, a wavering band of energy, endless restlessness. For us to perceive it, the sound waves emitting from the source must make our eardrums vibrate. Du Bois begins each chapter in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with lyrics and a few bars of musical notation from spirituals. With this gesture he makes the page vibrate. He contraposes the vibratory nature of music with the essentially lapidary nature of writing. As the cover flap to a collection of José Arreola’s works reads: “La escritura fue originalmente cincelada en piedra. Mediante la mano es una incisión del espíritu [Writing was originally chiseled into stone. A spiritual incision moving through the hand]” (1995). So the beat goes on and new theses arise with each laying down of foot to ground (for thesis also refers to the stressed syllable of a foot in verse). Harriet Jacobs reminds us that black loops in black music (including but not limited to rap and house) are always black loop(hole)s of retreat;[2] that black music, like black escape, is a never-ending activity and never an achievement. And when the black stutterer loops a syllable (m-m-m-m-m-m-mother), this too is a black loop, black music, black activity. My thesis is that if (fluent) speech has been used to police the border between humans and non/subhumans, then black dysfluency enfleshes (to borrow a term from Ashon Crawley) the paradox of black humanity.[3] Are black people humans? The jury’s still out on that. And who’s on the jury? Further: if speech is a property of the living, black dysfluency enfleshes the paradox of black life itself. Do black lives matter? If so, why does the phrase need to be “repeated and recited incessantly?”[4] We live within the veil, and the veil is ever waving. How can we think about blackness and dysfluency together?[5] We can begin here: About this time my master came down the field. I became very bold and answered him when he called me. He asked me very roughly how I came to plow up the corn, and where the horse and plow were, and why I had got along so slowly. I told him that I had been talking with God Almighty, and it was God who had plowed up the corn. He looked at me very strangely, and suddenly I fell for shouting, and I shouted and began to preach. The words seemed to flow from my lips. When I had finished I had a deep feeling of satisfaction and no longer dreaded the whipping I knew I would get. My master looked at me and seemed to tremble. He told me to catch the horse and come on with him to the barn. I went to get the horse, stumbling down the corn rows. Here again I became weak and began to be afraid for the whipping. After I had gone some distance down the rows, I became dazed and again fell to the ground. In a vision I saw a great mound and, beside it or at the base of it, stood the angel Gabriel. And a voice said to me, ‘Behold your sins as a great mountain. But they shall be rolled away. Go in peace, fearing no man, for lo! I have cut loose your stammering tongue and unstopped your deaf ears. A witness shalt thou be, and thou shalt speak to multitudes, and they shall hear. My word has gone forth, and it is power. Be strong, and lo! I am with you even until the world shall end. Amen.’[6] Or we can begin here: Bernie Mac’s stuttering nephew is waiting at the bus stop. The bus pulls up, the driver opens the door, and the boy tries to ask a question. Impersonating his nephew, Mac closes his eyes, nods while shaking the microphone, and says “uh” four times. After sixteen seconds he returns to his “normal” voice and says, “Bus driver closed the door and drove the fuck off.” Next day same thing happens. “Bus driver closed the door and drove the fuck off. He ain’t got time for this shit here.”[7] “I’m gonna begin by borrowing a thought from Glissant: when we regard each other, we should tremble.”[8] This is how Teju Cole once introduced Fred Moten at a reading in honor of T.S. Eliot, who wrote: “For most of us, there is only the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time. / The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, / The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning / Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts.”[9] Or we can begin with my mother Pauline. I inherited my stutter from her. She was born in Higgin’s Land, St. Ann, Jamaica. Her father Charles, aged one hundred at time of writing,[10] is head pastor of a storefront in Canarsie, Brooklyn. My master looked at me and seemed to tremble. My thesis is that blackness, dysfluency, and music are shaped by forms of subjection enacted in the sphere of time—what I call temporal subjection. But because these three forces open and shape time, they create alternative temporalities that can help us heal from the wounds of that subjection. Healing, too, is an activity, not an achievement. Temporal subjection enacted against black people occurs in many spheres. Brittney Cooper examines several in her work: black women’s reproductive health; legal and extralegal murders of black people; racially skewed correlations between zip code and life expectancy; and the conceptualization of history itself.[11] Here I’ll focus on the plantation, and two scenes of temporal subjection discussed by Mark M. Smith in Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South. The first comes through the testimony of a former slave “named”[12] William Byrd, interviewed in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration: Master, he had great iron piece hanging just out side his door and he hit that every morning at 3:30. The negroes they come tumbling out of their beds. If they didn’t master he come round in about thirty minutes with that cat-o-nine tails and begins to let negro have that and when he got through they knew what that bell was the next morning.[13] Slavery’s ontological brutality knotted together time, sound, and violence. According to Smith, because masters wanted to inculcate time obedience in their slaves but didn’t want to give their slaves watches (“time-owning slaves would, after all, readily become like free, time-negotiating northern workers”), they generally kept clocks and watches for themselves.[14] They communicated clock time using bells, horns, and other sounds. And if the sound wasn’t obeyed, the whip intervened. When Byrd says ”they knew what that bell was the next morning,” he’s pointing to the ways that knowing the time, for slaves, was often shadowed by knowing the sound of that time (bell, horn) and knowing the consequences of not obeying that sound. The whip was an extension of the clock.
Black Language is capable of telling stories of slavery that cannot be yet understood otherwise. Even in the face of the academy one should read and speak or face losing the future of a life
Morrison 93. (Toni Morrison is an American novelist, editor, teacher, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Morrison won the Puliter Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1998. “Toni Morrison –Nobel Lecture” https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html) NAE
"You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation. "Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. "Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though it was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves. "The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed." It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence. "Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."