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American society in the 1950s
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My name is Lucille Clifton, but my birth name is Thelma Lucille Sayles. I was born on June 27th 1936 in New York to Samuel and Thelma Moore Sayles, and later died at the age of 73 on February 13th 2010. My parents never had the best education, but they supported me nonetheless in my own education, and after I received my high-school diploma, I went to study at Harvard university. Sadly, I was kicked out due to bad grades and had to continue my college career at Fredonia State Teacher’s College. After my successful college years, I became a well-known writer, poet, and teacher. My inspiration for writing came from the times that I lived through, mostly from the major social changes that were happening in the US from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. During my childhood, racial segregation, sexism, and discrimination in general were apparent in my …show more content…
every-day life, but the many African-American politicians and activists who were fighting for our rights, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks inspired me to join the fight for our rights by writing about being an African-American and a woman in the US, while questioning society’s discrimination and intolerance of certain ethnic groups. As for my career in general, I was the poet in residence at Cappin State College from 1971 to 1974, the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, and from 1985 to 1989, I taught writing and creative Writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
My 1st book of poetry – Good Times, published in 1969 was names as one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York times in 1969, and talked about the small joys of being an African-American family in poverty. In this selection, I had a special writing style, and I removed all punctuation and Capitalization from my poems while only using simple words and short phrases. I used this style to write my poems to focus the reader’s attention on the importance of the words that I used and their meaning. Another one of my major works was the Everett Anderson children’s book series. The books revolved around the life of a young African-American boy named Everett Anderson, and each book would teach the reader a small lesson about life. The main purpose of these books was to teach young children about ethnicity and cultural identity, while showing them that discrimination was
bad. One of my more important poem selections was “Blessing the Boats” that I published in 2000, which also won the National Book Award. In this collection, I wrote my poems in the same way as my other selection, and the main difference between them was that in Blessing the Boats I wrote only about the issues present in society, such as racism, sexism, and bigotry. My life work was to fight against all discrimination through my writing about African-American culture, both historically and in the US, problems in society and the small joys of life that remain untouched by poverty. To summarize the theme of my career, I once said:
Sharon Creech’s childhood memories, college experiences, and creative brain significantly affected her writings. She rarely thought of being an author growing up, but as time progressed, she began to really think about it. Creech first became interested when she entered college and something sparked her career. She wrote multiple books with her much thought and creativeness leading her to an outstanding writing career.
Writing as a Re-Vision. Eds. Beth Alvarado and Barbara Cully. Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster Custom Publishing, 1996.
Many writers begin writing and showing literary talent when they are young. Paul Laurence Dunbar, born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, was already editor of a newspaper and had had two of his poems published in the local newspaper before he’d graduated from high school. His classmate, Orville Wright, printed The Tattler which Dunbar edited and published for the local African American community. After graduating from high school, he was forced to get a job as an elevator operator which allowed him spare time for writing. He finally gained recognition outside of Dayton when, in 1892, he was invited to address the Western Association of Writers and met James Newton Matthews who praised his work in a letter to an Illinois newspaper. In 1892, he decided to publish his first book of poems entitled Oak and Ivy and four years later his second book of poems Majors and Minors was published. People began to see him as a symbol for his race, and he was thought of artistically as “a happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking being… in a log cabin amid fields of cotton” (Dunbar, AAW 2). Dunbar’s poems, written alternately in literary and dialect English, are about love, death, music, laughter, human frailty, and though Dunbar tried to mute themes of social protest, social commentary on racial themes is present in his poetry.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. Print.
As every well-read person knows, the background in which you grow up plays a huge role in how you write and your opinions. Fuller grew up with a very strict education, learning multiple classic languages before she was eight years old. Fern grew up with writers all throughout her family and had a traditional education and saw first hand the iniquities of what hard-working had to contend with. Through close analysis of their work, a reader can quickly find the connections between their tone, style, content, and purpose and their history of their lives and their educational upbringing.
I am in the process of writing my first novel in hopes to get it published after I graduate high school. Many students, and teachers unfortunately, have shot down my dreams of doing so but I have persevered with this aspiration of mine. I’ve found the people who think I can accomplish this are those who know for a fact I will continue with this dream.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Company , Inc. , 2004. Print.
When a writer starts his work, most often than not, they think of ways they can catch their reader’s attention, but more importantly, how to awake emotions within them. They want to stand out from the rest and to do so, they must swim against the social trend that marks a specific society. That will make them significant; the way they write, how they make a reader feel, the specific way they write, and the devotion they have for their work. Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgard Allan Poe influenced significantly the American literary canon with their styles, themes, and forms, making them three important writers in America.
Gwendolyn Brooks once said “I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it, and experiencing the challenge”. For some, writing may not be enjoyable or easy, but for Brooks writing was her life. Gwendolyn Brooks not only won countless awards, but also influenced the lives of several African Americans.
and Other Greats : Lessons from the All-star Writer's Workshop. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Print.
I was raised in an encouraging household where both of my parents greatly valued education. Although they were high school graduates, neither could afford to attend college; a combination of family and financial woes ultimately halted their path. As a result, my parents frequently reminded me that getting a good education meant better opportunities for my future. To my parents, that seemed to be the overarching goal: a better life for me than the one they had. My parents wanted me to excel and supported me financially and emotionally of which the former was something their parents were not able to provide. Their desire to facilitate a change in my destiny is one of many essential events that contributed to my world view.
As these few tales reveal, my memories of writing are strongly connected with the intense emotions I felt as I grew up. They are filled with joy, disappointment, boredom, and pride. I believe that each of these experiences has brought me to where I am today. I can only look to the future and hope that my growth will continue, and my writing will reflect those changes within me. As a writer, I have grown immeasurably and will continue to so long as I can find some paper and a pencil.
Society has a way of making people think everyone should look a certain way but that's not true! Lucille Clifton, an inspiring poet, made sure of this throughout her poems ("Lucille Clifton") Enduring a lot of things in life as a child and adult Clifton still came out to be a strong woman. Lucille Clifton, author of "homage to my hips" grew up with an abusive father which contributes to her poem theme accepting one's body for what it is no matter what society says. Clifton's past, enduring sexual abuse seems to play an important role in her poetry.
Lucy Maud Montgomery - her pseudonym L.M. Montgomery - first published “Anne of Green Gables” in 1908, and it immediately gained tremendous success. Montgomery was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1847. She faced numerous hardships throughout her lifetime, one of which being that her mother died of tuberculosis when Lucy was just 21 months old; which, in turn, caused her father to place her into her maternal grandparent’s care. She eventually prospered, the publication of “Anne of Green Gables” brought her great success, with it translated into 36 different languages and more than 50 million copies sold worldwide.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.