Each year, City High School holds a poetry café. During this event, many young adults have the opportunity to get up and perform for their peers. This past year, a plethora of young adults choose to perform spoken word poetry. Some demonstrated issues that multiple people deal with and others expressing who they truly are within themselves. Spoken word poetry is a necessity to openly discuss the issues that affect today’s youth.
Spoken word poetry allows young adults to deal with issues of gang violence. Two young men by the names of Nate Marshall and Demetrius Amparan recite a spoken word poem “Lost Count: A love story” because of the death of children that occurred in their neighborhood in Chicago that year. The poet’s voice is valued because they experienced firsthand the danger of growing up in the ghetto:
“Though Marshall's mother worried about his long commute to Whitney Young, it was the walk though his own neighborhood that frightened her the most. One day, during his junior year, four thugs jumped him at 115th and Halsted Streets as he was getting off the bus on his way home from school”(Turner “Poets Tell Story of Chicago School Children Killed).
With the streets being so dangerous, mothers worry about their kids simply walking to school. The fear of a child being shot in the streets is very real. Statistics from the crime lab at University of Chicago demonstrate this: “In the year of 2008, 510 people were killed and nearly early half were between the ages of ten to twenty-five and the majority of them being male” (uchicago.edu).
. Through the poem Lost count: “A Love Story”, the two young men are telling a story of each of their classmates while speaking each name of a child that has died. Young adults in ...
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... greater. Spoken word poetry shows great truths to the issues young adults experience today. The issues in our world tend to be over whelming. We need a voice and because of spoken word poets, we our provided with a way to.
Works cited
Turner, Dawn. "Poets Tell Story of Chicago School Children Killed." Chicago Tribune. N.p., 26 Oct. 2009. Web. 14 May 2014.
"CRIME LAB." Report: Gun Violence Among School-Age Youth in Chicago. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2014.
"The Truth about Children and Divorce." Emery on Divorce. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2014.
“Jason Taylor Foundation.” Jason Taylor Foundation. N.P., N.d. web 15 May 2014
Stlieber, Dave. “The power of spoken word poetry. “The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post.come, 12 Feb. 2014. Web.15 May 2014
"The Truth about Children and Divorce." Emery on Divorce. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2014.
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.
...r’.” Poetry for students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 43 Detroit: Gale, 2013. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?>.
The poem also focuses on what life was like in the sixties. It tells of black freedom marches in the South how they effected one family. It told of how our peace officers reacted to marches with clubs, hoses, guns, and jail. They were fierce and wild and a black child would be no match for them. The mother refused to let her child march in the wild streets of Birmingham and sent her to the safest place that no harm would become of her daughter.
The tone of Listening to grownups quarreling, has a completely different impact. When reading this poem, the reader has a more sad outlook on the thoughts of this author’s memories. Whitman uses ...
It is a sad time in American history when one can easily recount recent school shootings in their own area. This ease stems from a sharp increase in the number of firearms brought into elementary and middle schools across the country, with an intense focus on the issue beginning after the shooting of 20 children from Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. Most school shooters are male, white, and often upper middle class. They are also more, often than not, under some type of mental stress that is causing them to create this type of violence in our communities. In fact, many school shooters are never suspected of doing any harm to their peers and teachers until it is much too late.
In recent years a great deal of attention has been centered on youth violence. Numerous studies have been conducted on children of all races who are subjected to gun violence. However, violent behaviors start from within the environment where children have been exposed too. Household, poor communities and school as well have put children at risk. Yet the problems of violence relatively are increasing according to Children’s Defense fund that gets their information from the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, and other government statistics. It should be examined further since multiple acts of violent behaviors with guns continued to plague our society. In what ways can we stop gun violence from killing our children? Psychologists are interested in this question, and one answer is stop protecting firearms.
"Children, Youth, and Gun Violence: Analysis." Princeton. The Future of Children, n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2014. .
Divorce is becoming a worldwide phenomenon, significantly affecting children’s well-being. It radically changes their future, causing detrimental effects. According to (Julio Cáceres-Delpiano and Eugenio Giolito, 2008) nearly 50% of marriages end with divorce. 90% of children who lived in the USA in the 1960s stayed with their own biological parents, whereas today it makes up only 40% (Hetherington, E. Mavis, and Margaret Stanley-Hagan, 1999). Such an unfavorable problem has been increasing, because in 1969, the California State Legislature changed the divorce laws, where spouses could leave without providing cause (Child Study Center, 2001).
Marano, Hara Estroff. "Children of Divorce: 25 Years Later." USA Weekend. Sept. 15-17 2000: 16-17. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 04 May. 2014.
On the other hand, Naomi Richards, in her article “The Positive Effects of Divorce on Children,” shares a different perception on the impact of divorce on children. When it appears that most researchers see the negatives in terms of how divorce affect children, Richards, on the contrary, argues that divorce benefits the children in various ways. According to her, divorce is the best solution that can happen to a marriage that is plagued by contention and strife. She claims that it is rather dangerous for a child to reside in such an environment because of vulnerability to a violent act. In other words, if a child constantly gets exposed to hostility between his/her parents; there is a propensity for that child to become hostile and violent
Arkowitz, Hal, and Scott O. Lilienfeld. (2013). "Is Divorce Bad for Children?". Scientific American Mind. 24(1).
Along with almost any other topic, there are statistics based on divorce and the effects it has on children. First, the current divorce rate in the United States is the highest in the world. As of now, fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce and sixty seven percent of all second marriages end in divorce. The financial reality of divorce is hard to comprehend (Corcoran 1). Along with...
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.
Divorce is a growing epidemic in Canada and the United States. It affects both parties involved, being the spouses, and also has a profound affect on children of the marriage. Recently our government has been revising the old divorce act. It was apparent that it was time to revise the act because it did not properly protect the children from being caught in the middle of things.
Lyric poetry is based off song and establishes human condition, in this poem the condition of African Americans.